Today, I am thankful for those little cubes that leave me with a cool, refreshing feeling.
Once when I was sitting at an outdoor café in Europe, I ordered a ‘Coke Light’ to drink. When the waiter sauntered back forty-five minutes later with the can and a glass, I asked him for some ice. With a stern look on his face but a polite tone in his voice, he said: “You must be from America. Only Americans love ice so much. I’ll be right back.” Invariably, whenever I order a Coke outside of the collective fifty states, I’m baffled to see its arrival with no ice, or, worse yet, with a single ice cube. In all seriousness, I really do adore my ice. When the Kartsonis family recently replaced its malfunctioning refrigerator, my primary concern is that we select an appliance that produces sufficient ice and then can dispense it to me in a variety of ways – crushed and cubed. At work, I’ve even brought in my fair share of blue-toned ice trays so I can produce my own ice on demand.
Why is ice so revered by Americans, such as myself, and regarded so unfavorably elsewhere? It’s a fascinating question, and one that I did not appreciate its answer until very recently.
Interestingly, the history of ice is a relatively short one. Prior to the beginning of the 19th Century, ice was just one of those natural phenomena of winter. Unless you lived in the colder regions of the Northern or Southern hemisphere, you might have lived your whole life without ever witnessing water turn to its solid, glacial form. Even though ice cream was a known entity that dates back more than 2000 years, it could only be enjoyed in the winter months (or if you owned a slave that would carry some ice down from a high peak). Snow and ice would often be added to drinks to keep them refreshed, but this was a luxury few could afford.
Then, in 1805, while at a family picnic, two wealthy Bostonian brothers, the Tudors, came up with the idea of bringing ice to the world. On their estate, they had a pond from which they would harvest ice in the winter for commercial use in those places, like the West Indes, where ice was non-existent. Pooling their monies, they bought a boat and started to ship chunks of ice around the country and the world. They would stop in places in the US South, such as Charlestown, New Orleans, and Savannah, and convince the bartenders to perform taste tests of their beverages – either served warm or chilled with their ice. People reveled in the appeal of the refreshing nature of a cold drink, and the Tudor business began taking off. By 1826, they had refined their operation into an assembly process by which they would cut large grids of the ice on a pond or lake with a horse-drawn plow and then float them down make-shift canals to an ice house where the ice would be stacked high and tight, thereby keeping its frigid temperature.
By this time, others in New England and the Midwest caught on, especially since retailers began to realize that the cooling of fruits, meats, and milk with ice protected their products longer. By 1847, the Tudors shipped 52,000 tons of ice to 28 US cities via train or ship, and their hometown of Boston grew into the ice capital in the world.
At around the same time, a physician in the town of Apalachicola, Florida, was seeking way to develop ice, not as a nutritional amenity, but rather as a potential cure to the deadly yellow fever and malaria outbreaks he witnessed. As these diseases would disappear in the winter months, he was convinced that ice could relieve patients suffering from these fever-producing diseases (sadly, he did not appreciate the role of the pesky mosquito in this infectious disease). Nevertheless, he invented the first mechanical machine that could produce ice, which he publicly demonstrated for the first time today (July 14) in 1850. Eventually, the food industry caught on to his prototype, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The US would never be the same. Ice has become a frozen fixture in our world, irrespective of season. So as the US cries for this frozen delight (Ice, ice, baby!), my only question is this: When is the rest of the world going to notice?
Did you catch the irony in my choice of that last word?
Comments