Living beforefridges

China: ice men on paper, and a court’s dishes on ice

The Zhou li (Rites of Zhou) is an old Chinese book that sets out the offices of an ideal court. We print no date for it. Among the offices are the ice men, with their staff:

That is 94 people, on paper. Their duties follow:

The Zhou li says only that the ice store is tripled. The reason comes from its commentator Zheng Xuan (127 to 200), whose notes also describe the jian and the tray:

The Shijing (Book of Songs) has the ice cut and carried in:

The months are the old Zhou calendar’s: the last month of winter and the first of spring, when Bin, Zheng Xuan says, was still cold.

In the Zuo zhuan, under the fourth year of Duke Zhao, a hailstorm prompts a question. Shen Feng’s answer explains the hail by the way ice was stored and shared in ancient times, set against his own day:

The people who receive ice in Shen Feng’s account are people of rank: those whose salary included meat, titled men and women, and from them down to the old and the sick. We print no year for the exchange.

A Ming food manual, the Shiwu bencao (1368 to 1644, its author and painters unknown), pictures summer ice: blocks cut from rivers and lakes in winter and kept in ice stores until summer. Snow from the last month of the year, it says, keeps fruit well (after the Wellcome Collection’s catalogue entries for the paintings). The same manuscript pictures the more usual answer, a man preparing salted fish.

Japan and Korea: an ice room in a field

A Japanese chronicle, the Nihon shoki, which is written in Chinese, tells of a prince out hunting. We print no year for him.

Two characters are lost in the text we read; we mark each with ■. The first stays a marked gap in the English. For the second, “[melting]” is our supply, the sense the sentence forces. The ice in the prince’s field goes into drinks.

Miura Jōshin’s Keichō kenmonshū looks back at snow as tribute, and at a delivery that was stopped:

The last sentence may explain the fetching or the stopping, so we use it for neither. Kenchō is an era name, and we print no year for it.

A Korean chronicle, the Samguk sagi, records under the sixth year of King Jijeung of Silla:

Persia: ice stacked by the quarter, sold by the donkey-load

Jean Chardin reached Isfahan on 24 June 1673 and spent the next four and a half years in Persia; Shah Abbas II had first received him in 1666 (after John Emerson, Encyclopaedia Iranica). His chapter on the Persians’ food ends with ice:

Then how it is made, and the night it is stacked:

Chardin gives this as Persian practice, straight after naming Isfahan and Tabriz; he does not put the pit in either town. His first line says where the ice is sold, and nothing about where the pits were. The inches and feet are French units.

The pounds are French livres. The offcuts go to the people who helped, not to the whole quarter.

Chardin’s sorbet is the Persian sweet drink, sherbet. The sweet preparations are Langlès’s note of 1811, not Chardin’s, and may be sweets chilled with ice.

Hemming Jørgensen mapped 129 Persian ice houses on the Central Plateau between 2007 and 2009. They stored ice for local distribution in summer. Tehran once had more than 80 and Isfahan more than 40, figures he takes from Vahid Qobādiān, and some villages held festivals at the filling and the opening until the second half of the 20th century (after Jørgensen, “Yakhchāl”, Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2012).

A Persian geography that Langlès quotes in a note, the Nuzhat al-qulub, says of Kashan:

That is two removes from the Persian, and we print no date for it.

Mughal India: ice by boat, and saltpetre

The Ain-i Akbari of Abu’l Fazl files ice under the court’s water department, in its Ain 22. In the translation of H. Blochmann (Calcutta, 1873): “Since the thirtieth year of the Divine Era, when the imperial standards were erected in the Panjáb, snow and ice have come into use. Ice is brought by land and water, by post carriages or bearers, from the district of Panhán, in the northern mountains, about forty-five kós from Láhór.” Blochmann’s note on the thirtieth year reads “A. D. 1586”; another of his notes dates the writing to 1596. The supply ran to a timetable: “Out of the ten boats employed for the transport of ice, one arrives daily at the capital, each being manned by four boatmen.” On who used it the Ain says only this: “All ranks use ice in summer; the nobles use it throughout the whole year.”

The same Ain has a way to cold water with no ice in it: “Saltpetre, which in gunpowder produces the explosive heat, is used by his Majesty as a means for cooling water, and is thus a source of joy for great and small.” A metal goglet of water “is stirred about for a quarter of an hour, when the water in the goglet will become cold.”

Blochmann added a footnote of his own in 1873: “Here, in Calcutta, one sér of American ice costs two annas”. American is his word; he names no shipper.

Mari, Alexander and Rome: an ice house, snow trenches, snow water

Zimri-Lim, king of Mari, had it written that he built an ice house at Terqa, something no king on the bank of the Euphrates had built before. Writings from Mari hold the first known mentions of an ice house, by Jørgensen’s account; those ice houses were probably cellars inside palaces, and their main use seems to have been cooling the king’s wine (after the CDLI text of the inscription, and Jørgensen, Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2012). We print no date for Zimri-Lim.

Athenaeus cites Chares of Mitylene on Alexander at the siege of Petra in India: “ὀρύξαι φάσκων τὸν Ἀλέξανδρον [ὀρύγματα] τριάκοντα ψυχεῖα, ἃ πληρώσαντα χιόνος παρεμβαλεῖν δρυὸς κλάδους. οὕτω γὰρ παραμένειν πλείω χρόνον τὴν χιόνα”, “Alexander dug thirty large trenches close to one another, and filled them with snow, and then he heaped on the snow branches of oak; for that in that way snow would last a long time.” (Deipnosophistae 3.124c, Greek ed. Kaibel, who brackets ὀρύγματα; tr. C. D. Yonge, 1854).

Pliny the Elder, on an emperor’s cold water:

And on who drank what: “hi nives, illi glaciem potant poenasque montium in voluptatem gulae vertunt”, “Some drink snow, others ice, and they turn the punishments of the mountains into a pleasure for the gullet.” (Pliny the Elder, Natural History 19.55, our translation).

Cairo, the 1830s: jars in a current of air

Edward William Lane published his account of the modern Egyptians in London in 1836. The water-bottles of Cairo, he wrote, “are made of a greyish, porous earth, which cools the water deliciously, by evaporation; and they are, therefore, generally placed in a current of air.” A small projecting lattice holds such bottles: “Hence the name of ‘meshrebee′yeh,’ which signifies ‘a place for drink,’”. A watermelon is cut up and “left to cool in the external air, or in a current of air, by the evaporation of the juice on the surfaces of the slices; but it is always watched during this time, lest a serpent should come to it, and poison it by its breath or bite”. Lane reports the watching as what people in Cairo did; the serpent’s breath is their belief, not his finding.

The Andes: the potato that changes its name

Garcilaso de la Vega, in the Comentarios reales, writes of the whole province called Colla. In Clements R. Markham’s translation of 1871: “Among these there is one called papa, round and moist, and inclined to rot soon, on account of its moistness. To preserve it, they put it in the earth, and cover it with a very good kind of grass that grows in the fields there. They leave it for many nights exposed to the frost, for it freezes hard throughout the year in that province. As soon as the frost is passed, they cover the papas with straw, and press them gently to squeeze out all moisture, both that naturally existing and that caused by the frost. After they have been well pressed, they expose them to the sun until they have been completely dried. Prepared in this way the papa will keep for a long time; its name is then changed, and it is called a chuñu. This is the way all the papas were treated that were gathered from the lands of the Sun and the Ynca; and they were then stored in the depôts with the other provisions.”

José de Acosta, whose book was published in Seville in 1590, has the trade:

And on the province of the Collao:

Acosta’s chuño is dried in the sun, and he names no frost in the making. The frost and the pressing are Garcilaso’s.

Europe and Virginia: salt, smoke, and an ice house for ten dollars

In Claes Jansz. Visscher’s print of 1608, herring is gutted in the foreground, a smokehouse with a sign reading Souterij stands on the left, and in the middle the fish are packed into barrels (after the Rijksmuseum’s record).

For people who could afford it, animals and even fish were often kept alive until the moment they were wanted, and in La Varenne’s recipes (1652 edition) the opposite of “fresh”, for fish or meat, was usually “salted” (after Aaron Hostetter, eHumanista 25, 2013).

William Cobbett’s Cottage Economy (London, 1822) is firm about the pig: “A couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand methodist sermons and religious tracts.” His flitches cure in a salting-trough with a gutter, never “sopping in brine”. He has rules for ice too: “an ice-house should never be under ground, nor under the shade of trees”. In Virginia, he writes, “they keep their fish and meat as fresh and sweet as in winter”, and “A Virginian, with some poles and straw, will stick up an ice-house for ten dollars”. Then, of England: “It is very hard to imagine, indeed, what any one should want ice for in a country like this”.

Europe’s ice houses were used to keep drinks and food cold, by Jørgensen’s account in the Encyclopaedia Iranica.

No first home fridge, only dated markers

The sources we read give no first fridge in a home. They give dated things, and each shows the change unfinished.

Boston, 10 December 1805. Frederic Tudor writes to a cousin: “William & myself have formed a plan of carrying Ice to the west Indies”. He has done the sum, “By calculation the ice will cost us there not much over a cent a pound!”, and weighed the risk: “If we fail, which is next to an impossibility, the loss is trifling.” On 4 August 1852 he looked back on the first cargo, which went “in a Brig, belonging to myself bound for S. Pierre, Martinique”, in February 1806 by his count. Wherever ice was brought in, to places of sufficient population and prosperity, he wrote, “it has been unsuccessful at first”. By 1835 Tudor was shipping ice to Calcutta, and at one time he had ice houses in Havana, Jamaica, New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Galle and Singapore (after the editor of his letters, 1932).

Walden Pond, the winter of 1846 to 1847. Henry David Thoreau: “In the winter of ’46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning”. He asks, “Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever?”, and concludes: “Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well.” That is his claim, not a shipping record. Much of one heap of the pond’s ice, he also writes, “never got to market”; what was not carried off “was not quite melted till September 1848”.

6 May 1851. John Gorrie, “of the city of New Orleans”, is granted US patent 8,080 for “a new and useful Machine for the Artificial Production of Ice and for General Refrigeratory Purposes”. A patent proves a patent; nothing we read says his machine reached a home.

Wellington, 26 February 1926. Under the heading “Ice for the Home”, the Evening Post printed a cable from London, dated the day before, about an invention “demonstrated to doctors and scientists at the Savoy Hotel”. By the cable, “the inventors are two young students of the Stockholm University”; it does not name them. The paper then added a note of its own: “the invention described is not a novelty”. It went on: “such machines have been freely advertised in the United States for a considerable time and one is in operation in the Dunedin exhibition”. The paper guessed that the demonstration was “presumably staged” because rules on preservatives in dairy produce “would compel Britain to adopt the American habit of using ice-boxes for keeping food”. We read the piece as the scan’s machine-read text, which has no capitals, so the capitals in these quotations are ours.

The stories that don’t hold up

“Before fridges, ice was only for drinks.”

Mostly, in Persia and Mughal India. But the Zhou li puts all the dishes of the outer and inner cooks into the ice chests, Cobbett’s Virginians keep fish and meat in their ice houses, and Europe’s ice houses held food as well as drinks.

“Persia’s ice houses were fridges for food.”

Jørgensen, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica: “they were not used for refrigerating foodstuff”. The yakhchāl was an ice store, and its ice was for local distribution in summer. Nor is there a date for a first one: pits seem to go back to the 1st millennium BCE, but, by Jørgensen’s account, no evidence shows how pits became ice houses, and Europeans first mention Iran’s ice houses in the 17th century.

“Medieval cooks used spices to hide rotten meat.”

Aaron Hostetter calls the story “hardly more than a myth of the modern age”. Animals were often kept alive until they were needed, and spices would not cover the taste or smell of spoiled meat, a point he takes from Paul Freedman.

“Nero invented ice cream.”

Pliny credits Nero with boiled water chilled in glass lowered into snow. There is no cream in the sentence, and no sugar.

“Chuño is freeze-dried.”

Garcilaso’s potatoes are left in the frost, pressed under straw and dried in the sun. Acosta names only the sun. Frozen, pressed and dried is as far as the sources go.

“Frederic Tudor invented shipping ice.”

His own letter of 1805 collects earlier reports: ice “carried every year to S. Eustatius”, ice reaching the West Indies “on the ends of boards”, and a captain who took Norway ice to London.

“The fridge was invented in the 1920s.”

Gorrie patented an ice and refrigerating machine in 1851, and in 1926 a Wellington paper called the machine shown at the Savoy “not a novelty”.