Americans appreciated ice as no people had before. They used it to chill beer and wine, to make delectable icy cocktails, to soothe fevers and to create a vast range of frozen treats. Ice creams became popular – and startlingly inventive, too. At Delmonico’s, the celebrated New York restaurant, customers could order pumpernickel rye ice cream and asparagus ice cream, among many other unexpected flavours. New York City alone consumed nearly a million tons of ice a year. Brooklyn sucked down 334,000 tons, Boston 380,000, Philadelphia 377,000. Americans grew immensely proud of the civilizing conveniences of ice. ‘Whenever you hear America abused,’ one American told Sarah Maury, a visiting Briton, ‘remember the ice.’ Where ice really came into its own was in the refrigeration of railway cars, which allowed the transport of meat and other perishables from coast to coast. Chicago became the epicentre of the railway industry in part because it could generate and keep huge quantities of ice. Individual ice houses in Chicago held up to 250,000 tons of ice. Before ice, in hot weather milk (which came out of the cow warm, of course) could only be kept for an hour or two before it began to spoil. Chicken had to be eaten on the day of plucking. Fresh meat was seldom safe for more than a day. Now food could be kept longer locally, but it could also be sold in distant markets. Chicago got its first lobster in 1842, brought in from the east coast in a refrigerated railway car. Chicagoans came to stare at it as if it had arrived from a distant planet. For the first time in history food didn’t have to be consumed close to where it was produced. Farmers on the boundless plains of the American Midwest could not only produce food more cheaply and abundantly than anywhere else, but they could now sell it almost anywhere. As late as 1930 America had 181,000 refrigerated railway cars and they were all cooled with ice.adapted from At Home - A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson (2010)
Posted on: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 05:22:32 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015