Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (35 page)

In the end, the technology that most improved the diet of American families was not canning but refrigeration, which really did give people access to “a kitchen garden where all good things grow.”

 

I
n 1833, a surprising consignment arrived in Calcutta, then the center of the British Empire in India. It was forty tons of pure crystalline ice, which had come all the way from Boston on the East Coast of the United States, a journey of 16,000 miles, shipped by Frederick Tudor, an ice entrepreneur.

The Boston-to-Calcutta ice trade was a sign of how America was turning ice into profit. As an abundant natural resource, ice is ancient. There were ice harvests in China before the first millennium BC. Snow was sold in Athens beginning in the fifth century BC. Aristocrats of the seventeenth century spooned desserts from ice bowls, drank wine chilled with snow, and even ate iced creams and water ices. Yet it was only in the nineteenth century in the United States that ice became an industrial commodity. And it was only the Americans who recognized and exploited the fact that the biggest bucks were not in making icy treats but in using ice for refrigeration: the preservation of food.

Cold storage was not unknown before the nineteenth century. Many estates in Italy had their own icehouses, such as the one in the Boboli Gardens in Florence. These were pits or vaults, heavily insulated—usually with turf or straw—in which unevenly hacked
slabs of winter ice could be kept cold for the summer. These houses were not, however, principally devices for preserving food but were for preserving ice, so that it would be ready for cooling drinks or making lavish ice creams at the height of summer. The icehouse may sometimes have been used to supplement a larder—but the primary function was keeping its owners supplied with sweet cold treats, the accoutrements of civilized living. To have access to ice in the summer—to flout the seasons—was a sure sign of wealth. “The rich get their ice in the summer, but the poor get theirs in the winter,” as Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote in her book about life married to a struggling farmer on the Dakota prairie in the 1880s.

In America at large—a country of vast distances and extremes of climate—the lack of ice affected the entire food supply. Butter, fish, milk, and meat could only be sold locally. Most butchers killed only what meat they could sell in a single day. Unsold meat—known as the shambles—was left to rot on the streets. Unless you were a country dweller with a kitchen garden, green vegetables were a rarity. The basic diet was salt pork and bread or corn bread. Consumers in the city and producers in the countryside had few ways to reach one another. In 1803, an enterprising Maryland farmer named Thomas Moore worked out that he could sell more butter if he could take it further to market. Moore created one of the very first “refrigerators”: an egg-shaped cedar-wood tub, with an inner metal container for the butter. Between the metal and the wood, there was a gap, which could be packed with ice.

The first great technological breakthrough in the American ice industry was the horse-drawn ice cutter, patented by Nathaniel J. Wyeth in 1829. Before this, ice was harvested—with great difficulty, using axes and saws—in uneven blocks. With far less effort, for the humans, if not the horses, Wyeth’s ice cutter produced perfect square blocks, easy to stack and transport. There were epic profits to be made. As of 1873, it cost 20 cents a ton to harvest ice on the Hudson River. This could be sold on to private customers for as much as $4 to $8 a ton, a potential profit margin of 4,000 percent.

In 1855, horsepower was joined by steam power in the ice harvest, and as many as 600 tons could now be harvested in a single hour. Supply increased; but so did demand. In 1856, New York City used 100,000 tons of ice; in 1879–1880, the city needed nearly 1 million tons, and rising. Nearly half of all the ice sold went to private families. Ice companies delivered ice on wagons or trucks for a flat daily or monthly charge. Ice was kept in an icebox—a primitive refrigerator, little more than a tin- or zinc-lined wooden box with shelves like a kitchen cabinet, with a drainage hole at the bottom for the meltwater. Iceboxes were smelly and inefficient, with no means of circulating the air. But still—what a boon—to be able to enjoy cold-ish food on a July day; to stop fresh milk from going sour for a few hours, if not days; to chill a bowl of plums.

Ice wrought its greatest nineteenth-century transformations, however, not in private homes but in the commercial food supply. A combination of vast cold-storage warehouses and refrigerated railroad cars opened up entirely new food markets. The meat, dairy, and fresh produce industries were the biggest winners. By the time of World War II, Americans were known around the world for their seemingly inordinate appetite for meat and milk (supplemented with glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice and green salads). This appetite—and the means of satisfying it—was largely a creation of nineteenth-century refrigeration.

In 1851, butter was first transported in refrigerated railroad cars from New York City to Boston. Fish, too, began to travel the country, and in 1857, fresh meat went from New York to the western states. Refrigerated “beef cars” created a new meatpacking industry, centered in Chicago. This was a very American phenomenon: by 1910, there were 85,000 refrigerated cars in the United States, compared to just 1,085 in Europe (mostly in Russia). Fresh meat no longer had to be slaughtered and used immediately. “Dressed beef” could be cooled, stored, and shipped anywhere.

The new refrigerated cars had fierce critics, as do all new food technologies. Local butchers and slaughterhouses objected to the loss of business and lamented Chicago’s growing monopoly on meat (and judging from the horrific conditions in Chicago meatpacking factories described in Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle,
they may have had a point). More generally, the population at large was scared of the very thing that made refrigeration so useful: its ability to extend the storage time of food. Alongside the growth in refrigerated cars was a huge growth in cold-storage warehouses. By 1915, 100 million tons of butter in America were in cold storage. Critics argued that “delayed storage” could not be good for the food, reducing its palatability and nutritional value. Another persistent worry was that cold storage was a scam: by delaying the sale of produce, the sellers could push prices up.

One more concern about refrigeration—particularly for dairy foods, whose storage need to be scrupulously clean—was that natural ice was not always pristine, often containing dirt, pond weeds, and other vegetation. Local boards of health would periodically condemn large amounts of naturally harvested ice as unfit for human consumption.

This was one of the reasons refrigeration in America increasingly moved from natural ice to factory-made ice. Humans had known ways of making artificial ice for centuries, but by and large they had done so not for the purposes of refrigeration but for making ice creams and cold drinks. The Elizabethan scientist Francis Bacon was one of the few exceptions. According to the biographer John Aubrey, Bacon died in 1626 from a chill contracted while attempting to use snow to preserve a chicken. He also conducted investigations into the use of saltpeter, for what he called “the experiment of the artificial turning of water into ice.” Bacon attacked the frivolous uses to which the rich tended to put their ice. It was “poore and contemptible” to manufacture ice purely for such niceties as cooling their wines instead of using it for “conservatories,” by which he meant refrigerators. Bacon was surely right
that this was largely a question of priorities. Whereas refrigeration was neglected for centuries, the technology of ice cream was extremely advanced.

 

T
he ad for Mrs. Marshall’s Patent Freezer, an ice-cream maker from 1885, shows a picture of a shallow, circular, hand-cranked machine and includes this boast:

 

Ice cream in three minutes? By hand? Today, the top-of-the-line electric ice-cream makers aimed at home cooks at a cost of $100 to $200 boast that they can deliver “ice cream or sorbet in less than thirty minutes.” How could Mrs. Marshall’s machine possibly have made ice cream in a tenth the time, without the aid of electricity?

It sounds like commercial hype. Mrs. Marshall was an extremely shrewd businesswoman, skilled at promoting her own interests. A mother of four from St. John’s Wood in North London, she ran a school of cookery at 31 Mortimer Street, first established in 1883. Judging from the portraits in her books, she was an attractive brunette, rather in the mold of the dark beauties painted by John Singer Sargent: a bright gaze, bosomy blouses, tumbling curls piled up on her head. Fairly soon after her cookery school was established, Mrs. Marshall branched out with a shop, offering to equip entire kitchens with every utensil and appliance necessary, from knife cleaners to ornate ice-cream molds. She also sold essences, condiments, and food colorings and wrote cookbooks—two on ice cream and one on general cookery—always including plenty of ads at the back of the book for her own range of products.

In short, Mrs. Marshall comes across as exactly the sort of person who might claim her ice-cream maker took three minutes when really it took thirty. Sometimes, however, self-promoters actually do have something to boast about. As it transpires, Marshall’s Patent Freezer truly is a spectacular device. As of 1998, there were only five known machines remaining in existence. Three of them were owned by Robin Weir, Britain’s leading historian of ice cream and one of a small but passionate group of food historians who argue that Mrs. Marshall was a far greater cook than her near-contemporary Mrs. Beeton. When Weir started to experiment with his original Marshall’s Patent Freezers, he was taken aback to find that they really could produce soft, creamy ice cream in just a few minutes—if not quite three, then no more than five, assuming the batch was not too large.

I have seen a Mrs. Marshall machine in operation during one of Ivan Day’s historic cookery courses (Day is one of the other rare people to own one, and another Mrs. Marshall champion). To look at, it doesn’t seem so very different from the classic American hand-cranking machine invented in 1843 by Nancy Johnson, the wife of a US naval officer from Philadelphia, another great female ice-cream innovator. These homespun wooden Johnson-style buckets are still brought out in many American households as a way of keeping kids amused on a hot summer’s afternoon. Ice and salt are packed into the bucket around a metal container. Then the ice-cream mixture is poured into the container. The lid of the container is replaced, and you start to crank the handle, which turns the “dasher” inside, scraping the ice cream from the cold sides of the container as it freezes. On a good day, when conditions are not too warm and you’ve managed to pack in the maximum amount of ice and salt, the ice cream will be ready after twenty minutes of vigorous cranking.

Mrs. Marshall’s Patent Freezer does the same job four times as fast. How?

It is much wider and shallower than the Nancy Johnson bucket design. Freezing is a form of reverse heat-transfer. Heat flows away from the custard mixture to the chilly metal container. The greater
the surface area of the cold metal, the quicker the ice-cream mixture freezes. Mrs. Marshall’s freezer has a much larger cold surface than other ice-cream makers. Unlike in Johnson’s bucket, the ice and salt only go under the pan. As the ad boasts, “There is no need to pack any round the sides.” It has another innovation, too. In every other domestic ice-cream machine in existence, whether electrical or pre-electrical, the metal container stays still while the paddle moves around. In Mrs. Marshall’s freezer, the central paddle stays still, while a crank in the top turns the metal container around and around.

It is a superb invention, with just one flaw. In order to make it as affordable as possible, Mrs. Marshall manufactured her machines from cheap zinc, a poisonous metal. Therefore, although the remaining machines in existence undoubtedly do a great job of making silky-smooth gelato in a very short time, no one has tasted any in a very long time, except for Robin Weir. He tells me that he “eats ice cream out of mine all the time; at subzero temperatures the toxicity of metals becomes negligible.” No doubt he is right about this, but in today’s world any machine that toxifies your ice cream with zinc, however mildly, is not going to find many users.