“I mean to put a potato into a pillbox, a pumpkin into a tablespoon,” promised the overconfident American inventor Gail Borden Jr. No one knows whether those intentions of him were successful but he managed to place a liter of milk and 200 grams of sugar into a cup-sized can. It turned out to be tasty – that’s what we now call condensed milk.

It has taken many years for Borden to achieve that remarkable success. While he served as a land surveyor, drew maps and published a newspaper, he constantly came up with inventions – a portable cabin for dressing on the beach, an amphibious all-terrain vehicle, a simplified method of converting Catholics to Protestantism... But the main idea of his life was condensing – he even recommended the priest to condense his sermons. It was better with milk was better than with sermons. And even better than with meat – Borden’s meat biscuit won several awards but tasted like a failure. Milk also resisted at first – it tended to burn but Borden changed the design of the pan and lubricated its walls with fat. The “armored cow,” as the U.S. Army humorously referred to the product, was loved beyond the military.

Blue-and-white cans contributed to Soviet victories as well.