The Bizarre But True Story of America's Obsession With Ice Cubes

Henry David Thoreau was annoyed. It was the winter of 1847, and workmen had disturbed his tranquil peace by descending upon Walden Pond with axes and saws to harvest giant blocks of ice. They stacked them in columns that Thoreau called a “hoary ruin”—he opposed the noisy brand of “commercialization” they symbolized. And yet Thoreau couldn’t help but marvel at these ice towers. Some would even be shipped to India, where “the pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges,” he wrote.

For decades, Americans have gone a little, shall we say, overboard on ice. In the 19th century, iced beverages were a luxury reserved only for the rich, but in the Land of Opportunity, we had so much ice we couldsellit to the rest of the world. And we're still ballers when it comes to ice: Europeans are regularly gobsmacked by how much ice Americans shovel into their drinks, while American tourists marvel at the paltry one or two cubes they receive in their sodas across the pond. So how did America's love affair with ice firstsolidify?

Where ice came from in the 1850's: Hauled straight out of the water.

On the banks of Walden Pond, Thoreau was witnessing the rise of an industry. Many ancient civilizations had harvested ice in winter for use in summer, but no one did it as ambitiously as the Americans. The workmen hauling ice from Walden were employed by Frederic “The Ice King” Tudor, a Boston native whose ice harvesting business made him one of the nation’s earliest millionaires. He launched operations in 1806, after his brother commented that they could probably earn a fortune shipping ice from New England to the warmer Caribbean, where it could be used to preserve food and medicine.

Tudor’s early efforts were disastrous, with most of his profits melting, both literally and figuratively, in the heat. But better storage and harvesting techniques—like sawdust instead of straw for insulation, and horse-drawn ice ploughs instead of hand tools for harvesting—eventually minimized his losses and created profits.

In an effort to expand his business in the tropics, Tudor began suggesting people use ice not only to preserve food or medicine, but also to (gasp!)chill their drinks. Like any gifted dealer, he would first give it away for free and then charge once his customers were hooked. When people got used to cold drinks, they could “never be presented with them warm again,” he wrote.

As year-round ice became more plentiful and less expensive, America’s own taste for cold drinks grew. The colonial-era penchant for warm cocktails—a holdover from British drinking culture that used them to ward off damp chills—shifted to a preference for cold cocktails, the better to counteract America’s muggier summer heat. Giant blocks of ice were shaved for juleps, "lumped" for cocktails, and crushed for icy, booze-heavy "cobblers". Ice also helped boost production of lager beer—a style which is fermented, conditioned, and typically served at lower temperatures—that was growing more popular thanks to an expanding German immigrant population.

As ice grew more important to daily life, newspapers covered the ice trade closely. They warned of “ice famines” whenever winters were unseasonably warm and ice harvesters would respond by sailing to the Arctic and chopping up icebergs. People needed their ice—it was no longer a luxury but a virtual necessity. In order to ensure a steady supply, people began looking for ways to manufacture the commodity instead of harvesting it.

For many centuries, humans evolved technologies for artificial chilling. There was the ancient saltpeter-cooling approach, then techniques involving mixtures of salts and mineral acids, followed by scientists successfully creating ice with machines in the eighteenth century. But these methods were prohibitively expensive and didn’t make particularly good ice—it was no match for the cold, dense blocks pulled from New England lakes and rivers. Artificial ice was really only used when natural ice was hard to get, like in the American South during the Civil War, or in places where people were worried about pollution.

Just look how much food you can chill and freeze! Who needs an iceberg?

Image Courtesy Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive

Nevertheless, just as the technologies used to harvest natural ice improved over time, so did artificial ice making. The biggest shift happened when ice production moved into the home. Although nobody knows who invented the modern ice cube tray, the physician John Gorrie created a refrigerator that produced small ice cubes as early as 1844. Aside from drinks, the abundance of ice also gave fisherman a way to preserve their catch so they could stay at sea longer, and allowed growing cities to eat fresh foods shipped in from distant markets. Best of all, the rise of American ice increased the popularity of ice cream, a product that Americans today eat more of, per capita, than any other country besides New Zealand.

Despite these advances, one problem remained: frozen food. Available freezing technologies froze food slowly, which formed large ice crystals that ruptured a food’s cellular structure and turned it mushy. And because frozen food’s reputation was so bad, you couldn’t charge much for it, meaning that most of it was made from low-quality ingredients that were about to spoil. Frozen food was more unappetizing than even canned food, which the French nonetheless considered a delicacy. To them, frozen food was disgustingly “American.” There's the connection between Americans and ice all over again.

So tempting.

但到了1920年代,科学家们已经想出了很多办法to freeze food faster, preserving its freshness and texture. Innovators like Clarence Birdseye, father of America’s modern frozen food industry, began changing frozen food’s image by using better ingredients and, perhaps more importantly, by using better packaging. In 1929, he sold his company and patents to what would become General Foods Corporation, a company obsessed with bringing food into the future. It was also obsessed with savvy marketing and began scrutinizing consumer attitudes about frozen foods, modifying the advertising sellfreezer dinnersas a modern miracle and a boon to the harried "housewife."

Sure enough, Americans started to love their frozen food, aided by refrigeration advances that helped Americans store it better—and make their own ice. By 1930, Lloyd Copeman, (who happened to be the grandfather of singer Linda Ronstadt) invented a rubber ice cube tray. Shortly thereafter, Guy Tinkham devised the version we’re more familiar with today: a flexible tray that pops out cubes when twisted, just right for the new refrigerators with freezing compartments that were slowly becoming standard in kitchens across America. Getting ice this way only takes the flick of a wrist, not a horse-drawn plough or trip around the world, but it’s cool nonetheless.

By 1932, America was experiencing a new Ice Age. Even frozen food, once so despised but now about to fill American grocery stores, was warmly greeted byThe New York Timesas a “scientific miracle." And in the 1950's, the TV dinner became the most iconic food ever to emerge from the freezer. But even though Salisbury steak dinners—and ice cube trays—have continued to evolve into the 21st century, one thing remains the same: If we want to buy bags of ice, we still need to go to the store.