To sterilize a food by heating it to a high temperature, whether in a retort under pressure or by high-temperature short-time processing, a verb derived from Nicolas Appert’s name. The term belongs to the technical vocabulary of thermal processing, where appertising describes the application of the heat schedules that make canned and aseptically packed foods commercially sterile. Practitioners distinguish the severity needed for different products: low-acid foods require full sterilization temperatures to destroy Clostridium botulinum spores, while acid foods need only pasteurization-level heat. The word is less common in modern English-language food science than canning or retorting, but it survives in French-influenced technical writing and in historical accounts of preservation. Its persistence honors the empirical genius who launched thermal food preservation without knowing microbes existed.