November 25, 2023 • 47 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with author Fred Hogge about his new book “Of Ice and Men: How We’ve Used Cold to Transform Humanity,” covering everything from cocktail ice to the ancient history of ice houses. (originally published 12/06/2022)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We
are bringing you an episode from the Vault. Today. We
are featuring an episode that originally aired on December sixth,
twenty two.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Rob.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
This is an interview that you did with an author
named Fred Hogg about ice.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
That's right. This is a fun conversation talking about the
history of ice and our ability to exploit ice. So
as we get into the chillier months here, I think
folks will find this one quite enjoyable.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
And away we go.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb and I have an exciting interview for you today.
I'm going to be talking with Fred Hogg, author of
the new book of Ice and Men, How We've Used
Cold to Transform Humanity. Covers everything from cocktail ice to
the ancient history of ice houses. It gets into so
(01:13):
many wonderful areas. So I hope you enjoyed this interview.
This chat I had with Fred a tremendous amount of fun,
just as the book is a tremendous amount of fun. Hi, Fred,
thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Thank you very much for having me. It's really really
a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Excellent. Yeah, the book is so much fun. I just
read it the other day. Of Ice and Men, How
We've used cold to transform Humanity a wonderful, insightful, and
surprising look at humanity's history with ice. Humanity's propensity to
take ice for granted is a recurring theme in your book,
and I just was wondering were you prepared for just
(01:50):
how often it has been taken for granted in recorded history.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
That's a really really interesting question, And to one degree
I was because having sort of started out in my
career as an ancient historian, one finds oneself very limited
by what people not just what people choose to write about,
but what survives. So when you're dealing with the ancient world,
(02:16):
it's not just that people have the topics that they
think are interesting and that they care about, but we
also have to deal with this whole big problem of
textual transmission, and a number of books, fast number of
books just do not come down to us from the
ancient world, and some of the ones that do come
down by very very strange ways. If I remember correctly,
(02:39):
Katullus's poetry was found under a barrel in the fourteenth
century and that was the only copy that came through somehow.
And it's wonderful stuff. But when it comes to stuff
like ice and functional things, it requires, on the one hand,
an ancient writer to be interested, on the other hand
for it to be so. For example, we know an
(03:02):
enormous amount about aqueduct because a book by a guy
called front Tyness survives. If it hadn't, we would just
have the archaeology. But as it is, we have the
book and we know how they work with ice. I
knew that the sources would be will be slim for
the ancient stuff, and that's fair enough. And you spend
a lot of time trawling around just trying to find
(03:24):
a glimpse and mention as something here or there, But
you know it's but that's part of the challenge, that's
part of what makes it fun.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Now, this is probably a question you're being asked a lot,
but just in general, how did you come to write
a book about ice?
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Well, basically what happened was I hadn't really thought about
it as a topic to write about, and my wife's
a cookery writer and cookery teacher and she was doing
a class back when we lived in London, and she
asked me to help out and come and make some
cocktails for the customers. And as I was shaking up
these drinks, I happen to remark that if you don't
(04:04):
have ice, you can't really have a cocktail. And one
of the punters said, prove it. And basically that's what
I've set out to try and do. And as soon
as I started to delving into it, I realized what
an extraordinary, rich seam of information it is, because it
(04:26):
is that big sort of unsung hero and monster of
modern life, and it's changing us. I think it's quite profound.
I was reading what was it last week? I think
that the eighth billion person has just been born on
planet Earth. This is, in those small part down to
(04:50):
the extraordinary benefits that ice have brought. Humanity, both in
terms of our nutrition, in terms of medicine, int of
so many things, is absolutely supercharged the species. It's from
nineteen forty five to now, the species has exploded, and
it is entirely down to the fact that we are
(05:14):
able to feed ourselves so much better because of refrigeration,
because of cool chains, because of all of the benefits
that ice has brought us, and what burden does that
place upon the rest of the system. And I think
that's the big question.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Yeah, you returned to the idea multiple times in the
book that ice is inherently linked to civilization, and you
frequently invoke the nineteen eighty six film adaptation of The
Mosquito Coast. Can you remind our listeners of this film,
and I suppose of the book and it's use of ice.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
I have to confess I've never read the book. I've
only ever seen the movie, which is a terrible admission.
I know Paol through as a wonderful writer, but I
haven't read it. But in the movie version, directed by
the wonderful Australia and director Peter Weir, the lead character
Ali Fox as played by Harrison Ford, has this very
(06:07):
catching line of ice is civilization and then sets out
into the rainforest of Belize to build an ice machine
to bring ice to the people. That idea has always
struck with me. I first saw that film. Gosh, this
dates me now. I saw that film on general release,
so gosh, that was what eighty six. As you said,
(06:27):
I think came out in eighty seven in the UK
because we were often at that point a little bit
behind the United States. But yes, I think that he
has an absolute point. Ice has always been there from
the very beginning of civilization. The ancient Sumerians, the very
first civilized society, had ice, which is something that is
(06:51):
quite baffling to grasp, given as in the City of
a Rook. The first city is in the deserts of
southern Iraq, and you know, were you to visit it today,
you'd find this barren, wind swept, desolate landscape and it's
very hard to imagine a that it was once a blossoming,
(07:13):
fertile place and b that they could make ice there
and it's baking, it's forty five degrees in the shade.
But ice was there. Ice was inherent in their lives.
We don't know how they use it. We just know
that it was there, which is a Zever. Often one
of the big problems with archaeological sources. They'll tell you
a thing, but they won't give you a context. But sorry,
(07:36):
I'm rabbiting on I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Rob, No, No, this is wonderful. Yeah, because that was
what I was going to ask about next, was the
ancient Samerian ice houses, because this was this really blue
meal way, just imagining.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Well, blue meal way too, I've got to be honest.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Yeah, So is it thought that the ancient Sumerians invented
ice house technology?
Speaker 3 (07:58):
We just know, like I was saying, you know, we
have in the year thirteen of the reign of Shulgi,
they built an ice house. That's what the tablet tells us.
And that's it. I'm not a Sumerian expert at all.
I had to read up on quite a lot of stuff,
and I still don't fully understand it. But when we
look at those kind of cuneiform tablets from the ancient
(08:22):
Middle and Near East, particularly as we get into the
next section of where ice rears its head, and a
kingdom called Mari, which was situated in eastern Syria around
about like the fifteen fourteen hundreds PC, they mentioned an
ice house in their tablets. But when we get to
that era, what we do have is an extraordinary level
(08:45):
of correspondence written between the great kingdoms of the Middle
and Near East, from the Hittites to the Assyrians, to
the Mari to the Egyptians, and they're all broadly in Assyrium,
and we have some of these archives. The one in
Mari was discovered in the thirties. It is a huge
(09:07):
insight into how that world operated and how it worked.
And these kings would sort of, you know, write to
each other, you know, to the great King of Assyria,
my brother, how how you doing, or that kind of thing.
But again, the ice house in Mari is mentioned obliquely.
(09:31):
We know that it was there. We don't know if
there was only one or if there were many in
their various different cities, but we know they had access
to ice, and we know again it was a luxury item.
It wasn't something that was there for everybody. It was
a prestige product.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
And you mentioned these various other ice houses and ice
pits that pop up in other civilizations. Does it seem
like this is a case of cultural transmission or it's
just kind of like independent inventions from people who or
people or kingdoms that are in areas where they have
access to snow and then are figuring out ways to
(10:15):
keep that snow around.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
You have to have access, I mean, when we look
at the Persian ice houses or yat calls, these are
specially designed structures that operate on evaporative cooling, and they
in those kind of desert environments where the temperature drops
incredibly fast and as the sun goes down, you can
(10:40):
create conditions in a controlled space where you can freeze things.
So that is a technology specific to their environments. And
we're talking seven hundred BC five hundred BC or thereabouts.
When you start looking at ancient Greece or civilizations like that,
they have access to ice from mountain and they will
(11:02):
bring the snow down. And we see this technology so
in Italy and in Spain into the early modern era,
and it doesn't really change a whole lot. You some
poor bloke generally a bloke has to carry the snow
down and a thing on his back. You pack it
(11:24):
down hard into the ground into a pit that's insulated
with branches and then covered and then sold. And you
could do this. You can do this in the Lebanon
because you can get the the ice from the mountains
at at the top of the Becker Valley. You can
do it in Greece. You can do it in Italy,
(11:45):
the Appennines was the big source of ice from Rome.
You can do it in Sudden Spain as host it
is in Seville. You still have mountains quite close by
where you should where you can get the ice from.
But if you don't have that access, it's not going
to happen. And India is quite an interesting one because
because because again they were able to do an evaporative
(12:06):
cooling technique with special ponds, and as the cooler would
come off the mountains, you could place clay pots out
and the walls would freeze and they would have ice
for the next day. But again, this is a short
lived resource. It's not going to to be around for
very long, and therefore is the preserve of the wealthy
(12:28):
for really up until the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Now you get into we get into this area where
there there, there, there is. There are more mentions of
of ice, and one that I thought was was particularly interesting.
You mentioned first century CE Roman philosopher Seneca again for
ice sold in Roman markets. Do it Do we know
why he disapproved?
Speaker 3 (12:55):
I think we don't know. I don't know why he
is Seneca from everything that I know, what little I
know of Senege, he was a fairly sniffy old chap
he was. He yes, he was a very proper fellow.
It was our Seneca which probably why Nero killed him.
(13:16):
Great philosopher, great writer, really really really disgusting playwright in
terms of the amount of blood and gore in his plays.
Oh my God, in his version of Madea you actually
see the babies being thrown from the battlements on stage.
I mean, Seneca's plays are mental. And Shakespeare was a
very big fan of Seneca's playwriting, which might explain explain
(13:41):
all the clart and gore and Coriolanus, but he was, Yeah, Seneca.
Shakespeare was a big fan of Seneca's dramaturgy. Uh, he's
he does, he does like to you know him, you
know juvenile as well. There are a bunch of those
guys around that first century who do like to have
quite snotty opinions about how awful the modern world is,
(14:04):
which I suppose is something that hasn't really changed. But yes,
he was not a fan of ice. He thought ice
was bad people and that they shouldn't be doing it,
which is an idea that would prevail for quite a
long time, for at least another sort of five six
hundred years after his time. There's a Spanish doctor Minardist
(14:24):
who's I think I mentioned the book, who writes about
how bad ice can be for you. There's an enormous
amount of ink and paper wasted on medical literature saying
that ice is a bad thing in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Yeah, I was intrigued by this the more I read
in the book, too, because initially I was also reminded
of some traditions I think in like Chinese traditional medicine,
the idea that one should drink hot water as opposed
to chilled water. But then later on in the book
you also mention issues concerning the potential contamination of snow
(15:02):
with dirt. That later the idea that you could you
could have actual outbreaks due to contamination of.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
A lot of the We were talking about the Roman
stuff and all earlier on a lot of that ice
that was sold in those markets in ancient Greece, ancient
Romes actually snow compacted snow, and that contains inherently particles
of dirt and mud and bits. Where the market evolves
(15:34):
into thanks to a brilliant Bostonian guy called Frederick Tudor,
is the export of hand cut ice from lakes in
New England. And these are blocks of solid ice, and
solid ice is very much more pure than compacted snow,
and they were shipping this all around the world from
(15:58):
Tudor started in eighteen oh six and finally really got
it figured out in the eighteen twenties after the War
of eighteen twelve. Was you know, that kind of put
the kaibosh on him for a while. But as the
demand increases, you have two problems. The first is you
(16:19):
want to make more ice faster for your stores. So
they would do this thing which is called sinking the well,
whereby having cut a bunch of ice out, they would
also drill extra holes in the top of a pond
or lake so that the water would well up and refreeze.
But what that would do would it would capture your
footprints between the original layer that you were walking on
(16:40):
and the water that welled up, so there would be
dirt trapped within the ice, which was not exactly pleasing
to the customer. But the bigger problem, as you point out,
as time goes on is pollution, and the uptake of
ice usage runs parallel alongside with the industrial revolution and
(17:04):
the various pourings of industrial waste human waste into the
waterways which were then being harvested for ice, and one
of the most awful cases. There was a mental hospital
in upstate New York that used to cut its ice
from the river downstream of where their effluent pipe ran
(17:27):
in and a number of people died. And this is
kind of the beginning of the end for natural ice
as a commercial proposition.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Now, now, thus far far, I know a lot of
listeners are probably you know, we're talking about the use
of this ice.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
And hello, listeners.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Use is kind of a kind of a novelty. And
I know, I'm imagining drinks with ice in them, drinks
with bits of snow in them, and you get into this.
This is a really fun part of the book too,
talking about like a Florentine wine a chilling back in
the thirteen forty. Yeah, so I was thinking about that.
But then, of course another important iced treat comes up,
(18:03):
And then of course is ice cream. Yes, where do
we seem to find like the oldest possible evidence of
ice cream in the world.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
There's a lot of mythology wrapped up with ice cream.
So stories tell us that ice cream was invented in
China and that it was the privilege and unique dessert
of the Imperial Court and nobody else could have it.
(18:32):
And then the apocrypha goes on to say that Marco
Polo brought the recipe back to Italy. This absolute the latter,
It is absolutely rot. Or whether the Chinese we're eating
ice cream as opposed to of cooled, chilled things. That's
kind of hard to pin down. But ice cream in
the European context doesn't happen until the seventeenth century. There's
(18:58):
a lovely sort of piece of mythology that Catherine de Medici,
when she was married to the Dauphin of France, brought
the recipe and all kinds of other recipes with her
into France and transformed French cooking. But this is absolutely rot.
For one reason, she was thirteen fourteen and probably not
(19:18):
wildly interested in recipes at the time and would have
been stripped of all things Italian at the border. For another,
the science of how do you make cream freeze was
not known in Europe at that point, although it was
known in other parts of the world, and it crops up.
There's a twelfth century Indian Treaties which describes how to
(19:39):
do it, and it basically involves making a brine solution
within which to freeze your cream. The thing is cream
freezes about half a degree lower than water, so even
if you just put it in ice, you're just going
to end up with cold cream. So you've got to
find a way to make the chilling snow even colder,
(20:03):
and the best way to do that is to add
a shed load of salt to it. Brine freezes at
are much lower temperature, so you can get the surrounding
liquid down to about minus sixteen celsius and then you
have a chance of churning your cream into ice cream.
And Europeans did not figure this out for quite a
long time. I think part of the reason being that
(20:24):
salt was so expensive. This is one of the things
that is quite hard for us to grasp today because
you know, you go into the store and you can
buy a packet of kosher salt for less than a dollar.
The idea of salt being a prestige and expensive commodity
is something that battles us now. But it was, and
(20:47):
it was highly taxed as well. It was very highly taxed,
and so as good as ice cream tastes, even if
you know the science, you're not going to waste the
salt on it. If that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Because I'm just thinking to my own
experiences with making ice cream, like you end up using
a fair amount of salt, Like during it is like
a whole box of rock salt too.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Oh at least absolutely absolutely, do you handshen in one
of those old fashioned.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Oh no, I say that we tried. At one point,
we tried this device. It was like a ball and
the idea is you fill it up and then children
will play with the ball and that will eventually produce
ice cream via the churning. But we found that it's
a little too much to ask for children to continually
play with the ball that long, so it ends up
the adults just have to roll it back and forth
across the ground until it becomes ice cream.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
We have, imagine makes ice cream machine. We kind of
on the cheats way, but it works.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
So coming back to opinions against chilled beverages, how did
the medieval world view the consumption of chilled beverages? And
then where do we see that, like, where do we
see a shift in general opinion of chilled beverages and
so forth?
Speaker 3 (22:05):
Oh man, you'll bring in the big questions today, aren't you. Okay,
So in the medieval world, ice is certainly very present,
and we we know that particularly in the Middle East,
ice was was very popular. We we know stories of
salad There's a lovely myth about Saladein sending a sack
(22:28):
of ice to Richard the third when so Richard the
first and Richard the First was ill, probably not true.
We know again with Saladein there's the fantastic story of
him killing a guy called Raymond de Chatillon because Raymond
took a glass of iced rose water out of Saladein's
(22:52):
hand and drank it when it wasn't given to him,
and Saladin kills him stone dead, which is a scene
that crops up in Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, which
interesting movie. Original release cut, not very good, the director's cut,
which has an extra forty five minutes of stuff, and
it is actually quite the movie, and that scene is
(23:14):
very powerful. So we know the ice is very present,
and we know that people argue about whether it's good
for people or not. You always have your senecan kind
of people cropping up saying oh, you know, the party
poopers saying no, we shouldn't have any ice. But it's there,
is there is current, it's present, and it's as I said,
(23:38):
before is the preserve of the wealthy. As to whether
there's a shift or not of acceptance, I don't think
he never wasn't accepted. I just think that there were
your dissenters in literature who happen to be writing about it,
and their books survive. With a product like ice. The
(23:58):
fans aren't gonna buy they're writing, the dissenters will because
that sells. And twas ever, thus even you know, before
the invention of the printing press. So the people who
are who are writing and dissenting are are I think,
I think in the minority. I can't prove that because
there's just not enough information upon which to make a judgment.
(24:19):
But that's my hunch.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Okay, yeah, I mean it. It squares with a lot
of what we've been talking about with taking ice for granted.
And you know, unless you have an issue with it,
or in I guess in our experiences, unless there's a
problem in actually acquiring it, then you begin to realize
how how marvelous it.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Is well well exactly, and and you sort of see
that in the tropics, you know, people. That's why Frederick
Tudor hit on such a genius idea when he started
shipping it to the Caribbean and then further afield because
you had no ready source. I mean in Jamaica. I'm
I'm half Jamaica. My mother's from Antika Bay. We have
(25:01):
the beautiful blue mountains. But they don't get snow on
them that i'm they're high enough. But you know it's
too tropical, it's never going to happen.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
So let's let's get back to cocktails. I was, I
was very excited when you brought it up. I almost
wanted to shift ahead to the cocktail discussion at that point.
But yeah, yeah, to your point, like we think about
about mixed beverages especially, and we instantly think about ice,
we may and then there's so many ways to add ice,
(25:30):
you know, particular shames of cube, the different sort of
grains of crushed ice. Do you have a particular favorite.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Well, it depends on what the drink is, to be
honest with you, If it's like us of old fashioned,
a nice large, big cube, you know, if if it's
something else, then that they're may be a bit more crushed.
I'm a big fan of a good stirred martini.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
I know that some cocktail enthusiasts are so wild for
the for the pearl ice, or sometimes called here in
the States, that the sonic ice that I've seen memes about,
Like you're about leaving the bar if the if that
particular grain of ice is not available.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
I think that that's I think that's a little ponsi
if we're I mean, I'm a dive bar kind of
a guy, so you know, I'm not that fussed about
about it. But that said, that said, I do have
a friend in Los Angeles, a barkeep there, and he
designs ice.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
And he has an ice business and makes bespoke cubes
of various shapes, these beautiful sort of globes of ice
that are about like three inches across, and they're wonderful,
wonderful things. You can't help but be impressed by that.
But I'm a simple boy. But let's talk. But let's
talk cocktails, Rob, come on, where's the big question? Let's
(26:52):
go all right?
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Well, eventually you also you bring up Jerry Thomas's eighteen
sixty two Bartenders Guys, Yes.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
One of Will's great book. Well, he only mentions ice
once in the book, and he says in the introduction
he says ice should be wiped clean and set aside,
and then he doesn't mention it again beyond the fact
that it's in all the recipes, but he doesn't talk
about ice again. It's such a commonplace by the time
(27:21):
he writes that book. It's ridiculous. This was this You
asked me earlier on about the way into this book.
And you know, I've done my time in Bars. I
worked in Bars when I was a student to pay
my way through college and all the rest of it.
So I've had Jerry Thomas on my shelf for a
long time because I've had the book for so long,
(27:42):
I suppose this kind of blew my mind. It was like, what, wait, Jerry,
where's the ice? What the hell is going on? Man?
I just you know, I couldn't quite get my head
around it. Eighteen sixty two, he writes that Frederick Tudor
starts trading his eyes out to Boston in eighteen o six.
(28:02):
That gap of time, what's that fifty four years? Fifty
six years? My mass is atrocious. Please forgive me. Ice
has become every day it's become an ordinary, unremarkable thing.
And this to me blows my actual mind.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Yeah, I found myself wondering if it was just like
ice was ice at that point then. There just hadn't
been a lot of innovation. It was just you were
sort of happy to have what you had or.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
No, well, the innovation is is mister Tudor. And he
starts shipping, like I just said, in eighteen oh six
to Martinique, which doesn't go very well for him. He
hasn't got his his organization fully sorted, he hasn't got
an ice house built there to receive his cargo. It
largely melts on the dock. So he tries again the
(28:55):
next year, and he goes to Cuba, and that goes
rather better, but then start going a bit awright. He
manages the the first few years. The War of eighteen
twelve starts in of course, as its name suggests, eighteen twelve,
the seas are closed. The seas were closed earlier than that,
(29:17):
in eighteen oh seven, because the Americans didn't want to
have their seamen captured by the British impressed into the
British Navy who were fighting the French at that time.
So there was a whole thing going on with that
which made it quite tricky for him. He gets into terrible, terrible,
terrible debt to the extent that he's sent to prison
for it, and his father manages to get some people
(29:40):
together and have a whip bround and they bail him out,
and he gets back into business and he starts I
think it's Charleston first, and then Savannah in the South,
he starts shipping ice. And he also he doesn't just
ship ice to these places. He also invents ice bots
(30:00):
for our domestic use, which would put a lump of
ice on the top and you can keep your milky cheese,
your fish or whatever nice and cool. But his real
innovation is that he realizes that the gateway to the
ice business is drinks an ice cream. So whenever he
(30:21):
arrives in a place, when he arrives in Savannah, when
he arrives in Charleston in nineteen twenty four, when he
arrives in New Orleans, he gives the ice away to
bartenders for at least the first sort of period of time.
Because his theory is he writes one of his letters
to a guy called Stephen Cabot, who is managing one
of his ice operations in the Caribbean, is that I'm
(30:44):
going to paraphrase, I'm not going to quite quote this accurately.
He says, if a man has had his drink cold
for one week, he will not go back to having
it warm. And he's not wrong, particularly in those kind
of climates. And so you know, that's when the sort
(31:06):
of the ice cube gets into the old fashioned I
think is that is around that very era. I mean,
you know, nineteen twenty four he gets to New Orleans.
That's to me the birth of the cocktail right there.
He was brilliant. He was shipping to India by eighteen
thirty three, he was shipping to Australia by eighteen thirty five.
(31:28):
This is all hand carved ice from lakes in New
England going around the world. And it's one of those
brilliantly battling moments of history that's completely forgotten because we
don't need it anymore. But you know, there's this one
brilliant thing I think I reference reference it in the book.
(31:50):
I think about eighteen thirty seven, the ice supply dries
up in Calcutta, when the place goes nuts. All these
people are just going, you know, where is it? Their
editorials written in the newspaper saying, where has our ice gone?
How can we function like this, you know, and it's
(32:11):
kind of brilliant. So yes, because of Tudor's brilliance and
his determination to come into a place, bring a load
of ice, snack it up and sell it cheap and
turn it from being this luxury commodity for the wealthy
into an everyday necessity. And I think this is the
big thing. Is he makes it quittidian, he makes it ordinary.
(32:34):
He makes it something you cannot function without. That's why
Jerry Thomas is able to just say ice should be
washed and set aside, because to him is it is
now ordinary, and even as it is transforming his customer's experience,
even it is in eighteen sixty two beginning to form
(33:00):
the basis of the very first cool chains in the
United States, with big, massive locks of ice being strung
in hammocks in train cabins, over meat and vegetables, it
is now an everyday thing. And that's exactly the kind
of stuff that people don't write about, and it's exactly
(33:21):
why it's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
So coming back to wine a bit. We touched on
chilled wine earlier. How long does it seem like we've
been enjoying chilled wine? And and and I don't know.
I also can't help but think about the fact that, yes,
we still have for the most part, red wines are
not chilled.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
Or they shouldn't be. There was there was briefly a
fashion in Britain in some point in the nineteenth century
if a chilling red wine, which is an abominable thing
to do, And I honestly don't know what they were thinking.
I'm frankly ashamed of them. But I think that the
chilling of wine is something that has gone on for ages.
(34:12):
We have in Athanaeus's book, I can never pronounce this, right,
I'm going to try the depth nonstropistai. He records a
story of the comic play right, diphilis going around for
dinner with this woman called good Natheia, and she has
(34:32):
snow that's been sent by one of her lovers, brought
in to chill the wine. So that's you know, nearly
you know, two thy five hundred years ago. I think
that humans have always liked a cold, refreshing drink. I
think that it's just part of who we are. It's
just that we haven't had access to it for the
(34:56):
vast bulk of our history. And with wine in particular.
We know the Tuscans were very keen on chilling their
white wines down in the middle part Lost millennium. We
can attest to that. And God knows, those lovely flinty
whites that they make are beautiful and nicely iced and cold,
(35:18):
so they clearly knew what they were doing.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Now, the book explores so many other exciting fields, and
you get into space exploration, medicine, the food supply chain.
There's a lot more invention history in there. And then
there's even I was I was surprised and delight about
there's a whole chapter on the Terror and the Erebus. Yeah,
and part I was excited at that because I very
(35:43):
recently watched that that adaptation of Dan Simon's novel The Terror.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Oh, I haven't seen that yet. I'm looking forward to that.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Oh I have not read the original book, so I
can't compare it to that. But my wife and I
loved it. Thought it was terrific, wonderful performance.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
It's it's such a fascinating story and there's so much
that we just don't know about what happened to these
poor men. It is ghastly how poorly equipped and badly
prepared these men were sent into the answer. If the
(36:21):
boats had survived, arguably the men would but you know,
as Captain Willard tells us in Apocalypse, now never get
off the boat.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Yeah, even though, like like you point out in the
in in the book that you know they were they
had a lot of very advanced technology. They had these
sort of steam powered vessels, but.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
They did they had, they were They were among the
first ships in the British Navy fitted with steam engines
that were retractable. They had retractable propellers, They had chimneys
that they even had a rubber dinghy. And they had
a monkey called Jacko, who by all accounts was an
absolute bastard. They had a dog called Old Napp who
was beloved by all letters that that that that came
(37:03):
back before they they finally went into the Arctic tell
us that Old nep was. It was a big crew favorite.
They had a vast library. They were incredibly ahead of
the curve in terms of their awareness of the need
to take care of the men's mental health should they
be frozen in and this is one of the things
(37:23):
they absolutely got right. The real problem for them is
their cold weather clothes were largely made of wool, which
is in fact the most terrible insulator if you're in
an Arctic environment, because you know you do the work
needs to be done, you sweat into the wool. Then
you stop working, you start getting cold, and the sweat
(37:44):
in the wolf freezes and this is a problem, and
nobody thought to ask the locals, apart weirdly from the
guy who was the first person to report back news
of what happened to the Franklin expedition, and explorer called
John Ray, who was a Scottish guy. He was a surveyor,
(38:05):
he was a surgeon. He's probably the only Arctic explorer
of the era from the UK who never got a
knight head. And he was the one guy who learned
how to speak to the Inuit and learned how to
move like the Inuit, dressed like the Inuit, survive hunt
exist in that fashion, and he is largely unique amongst
(38:32):
those nineteenth century polar explorers. And he was the one
guy who got the first, the first stories, the first
Inuit testimony of what happened to the men of the
Franklin expedition, as tragic as it was, and was rubbished
for his efforts by no lesser author than the ghastly
Charles Dickens, who, really, you know, was I can't talk.
(38:58):
I need to stop talking about Dickens. I can't stand
the man. He's been the bane of my life since school.
I can't read his stuff. He's a racist bastard. I
can't stand him.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yeah, I wasn't familiar with I wasn't familiar with the
history of dickens involvement in all of them.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
He was a great friends with Lady Jane Franklin, John
Franklin's widow, And when the Ray Report came in, which
told terrible stories of anthropophagy and starvation and enormous suffering,
he basically took to his magazine outlet, a periodical called
(39:35):
Household Words, to lambast these stories and basically say it
must have been the barbarous Inuit who 't our brave,
noble naval officers, rather than the meeting themselves. And he
couldn't He couldn't countenance the idea that a oral society
(40:00):
could know something and tell us something that might be
useful to him. That was preposterous because they couldn't write
anything down. Therefore, they're absolutely useless, in his opinion, and
he writes this stuff down, and you know, we tend
to remember his novels, which I find verbose and quite dull,
(40:22):
but generally speaking quite open hearted. His journalism not so much.
His journalism betrays the full on Victorian that he and
he can be both things at once. I mean, you know, yes,
and I was, weirdly, I was talking to a friend
on the phone earlier on the Only bit of Dickens
(40:44):
that I actually like is the David Lean film Great Expectations,
which I think is a tremendous movie and a brilliant
bit of storytelling. But one of the main reasons why
it's a brilliant bit of storytelling he doesn't have all
that bloody verbiage in it, and Lean is brilliant at
his image selection and everything else. It's a fantastic and
(41:05):
very disturbing movie. But Dickens and me, we're not friends.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
So cannibalism Charles Dickens cocktails space exploration. You cover a
lot of ground in this book. Was there any area
in particular that you've found your self surprised that you
were going to be covering? Like, well, I didn't think
I was going to be writing about this in my book,
but here, I am, well.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
I have to confess you've mentioned space exploration. I was
going to do a chat space exploration and then I
was late on my deadline and I didn't do it.
So sadly that's not in maybe if there's a sequel.
But the winter sports stuff, yes, was very interesting to me,
particularly the Jean Claude Killi stuff and the way he
(41:53):
became such a marketing phenomenon in the United States in
the early seventies and reading the Hunter Thompson article about him.
That was really interesting because it never occurred to me
I'm in part I mean, I'm godly I'm fifty now
and so when when I was a kid, ski coverage
(42:15):
was just beginning to happen on British television. We had
this show called magazine show called Ski Sunday, and it
would cover all the big races in Europe and it
was tremendously exciting and we were gripped. We only had
three channels, so we didn't have a great deal of choice,
but it was fantastic stuff. The medical chapter as well,
(42:37):
was was was eye opening, particularly Samuel Tillischman's Tisherman's Sorry,
his work on trying to freeze down the body of
a trauma patient as quickly as possible to try and
stop the brain damage before you can stop the bleeding.
The biggest problem that you have should you be shot
(43:01):
or stabbed is bleeding out and the organ failure that
then follows. And what he's trying to do, and he's
just going into the second phase of clinical trials right now,
is to work out a way that you get the
patient into the emergency room and you chill them right
down as fast as you can to protect the brain
and to protect the heart, so you can then get
(43:23):
in and you have time to deal with whatever the
traumatic issue is that is causing the blood loss. And
this is absolutely cutting edge stuff. And when I started
writing that chapter, I had no idea that mister Tischerman existed.
Doctor Tischman. That absolutely blows my mind. It's extraordinary. I
(43:44):
stumbled into that chapter because I saw a documentary back
in the nineties about using hypothermia in open heart surgery
and how it hadn't quite worked out, but it was
the history of the early state of open heart surgery
and how chilling the patient and using hypothermia was really
(44:05):
the best way to stop the heart jumping about before
somebody invents the bypass machine, and so I was fascinated
by the idea of how you can use hypothermia in
a therapeutical setting. Nothing prepared me for what doctor Tishman
is up to, and it is the most astounding stuff
and if it works, it's going to genuinely transform trauma medicine.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yeah, remarkable stuff, especially comparing it to the earlier parts
of the book where you're talking about the experiences of
freezing to death. I've been very fortunate to never experience
that myself. When you're talking about like the phase you
reach where you're like, oh, I'm actually quite warm. I
need to strip a few layers off.
Speaker 3 (44:47):
I know it's mad, And actually, when you read the accounts,
it actually doesn't seem like such a bad way to go,
you know. Apparently it's quite a trippy high, you know that.
I not that I want to freeze the dead, but
if there's an option, you know, that doesn't seem like
one of the worst ways in which one can step
(45:09):
off this mortal coil.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
All right, well, Fred, thanks for taking the time out
of your day to chat with me about the book.
The book again is of ice and men. How we've
Used Cold to Transform Humanity. As of this publication of
this initial publication of this episode, the book is out
in the US, and I think correct me if I'm wrong,
but it's coming out in the UK in the next
couple of months in February. Okay, excellent. Well, I greatly
(45:34):
enjoyed it. I highly recommend it to all of our listeners.
I think everyone out there will enjoy the book.
Speaker 3 (45:39):
Well, thank you so much, Robert. I've really enjoyed talking
to you this evening.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
All right, thank you, take Cam out. Thanks again to
Fred Again. The book is of ice and Men, how
We've used cold to transform humanity. Highly recommend you check
it out. There's a little something in here for everybody,
just a wonderful exploration of something that you may taking
for granted right now. I didn't even think about it,
(46:03):
but throughout the interview, I of course had at an
entire container of iced water, chilled water, right next to me,
and I didn't even think about the connection. Thanks as
always to Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show. And
if you would like to reach out to me or
to Joe, any of us here at the show, you
can shoot us an email at contact at Stuff to
(46:25):
Blow Your Mind dot com.
Speaker 4 (46:35):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
(47:00):
A Foo
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We
are bringing you an episode from the Vault. Today. We
are featuring an episode that originally aired on December sixth,
twenty two.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Rob.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
This is an interview that you did with an author
named Fred Hogg about ice.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
That's right. This is a fun conversation talking about the
history of ice and our ability to exploit ice. So
as we get into the chillier months here, I think
folks will find this one quite enjoyable.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
And away we go.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb and I have an exciting interview for you today.
I'm going to be talking with Fred Hogg, author of
the new book of Ice and Men, How We've Used
Cold to Transform Humanity. Covers everything from cocktail ice to
the ancient history of ice houses. It gets into so
(01:13):
many wonderful areas. So I hope you enjoyed this interview.
This chat I had with Fred a tremendous amount of fun,
just as the book is a tremendous amount of fun. Hi, Fred,
thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Thank you very much for having me. It's really really
a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Excellent. Yeah, the book is so much fun. I just
read it the other day. Of Ice and Men, How
We've used cold to transform Humanity a wonderful, insightful, and
surprising look at humanity's history with ice. Humanity's propensity to
take ice for granted is a recurring theme in your book,
and I just was wondering were you prepared for just
(01:50):
how often it has been taken for granted in recorded history.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
That's a really really interesting question, And to one degree
I was because having sort of started out in my
career as an ancient historian, one finds oneself very limited
by what people not just what people choose to write about,
but what survives. So when you're dealing with the ancient world,
(02:16):
it's not just that people have the topics that they
think are interesting and that they care about, but we
also have to deal with this whole big problem of
textual transmission, and a number of books, fast number of
books just do not come down to us from the
ancient world, and some of the ones that do come
down by very very strange ways. If I remember correctly,
(02:39):
Katullus's poetry was found under a barrel in the fourteenth
century and that was the only copy that came through somehow.
And it's wonderful stuff. But when it comes to stuff
like ice and functional things, it requires, on the one hand,
an ancient writer to be interested, on the other hand
for it to be so. For example, we know an
(03:02):
enormous amount about aqueduct because a book by a guy
called front Tyness survives. If it hadn't, we would just
have the archaeology. But as it is, we have the
book and we know how they work with ice. I
knew that the sources would be will be slim for
the ancient stuff, and that's fair enough. And you spend
a lot of time trawling around just trying to find
(03:24):
a glimpse and mention as something here or there, But
you know it's but that's part of the challenge, that's
part of what makes it fun.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Now, this is probably a question you're being asked a lot,
but just in general, how did you come to write
a book about ice?
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Well, basically what happened was I hadn't really thought about
it as a topic to write about, and my wife's
a cookery writer and cookery teacher and she was doing
a class back when we lived in London, and she
asked me to help out and come and make some
cocktails for the customers. And as I was shaking up
these drinks, I happen to remark that if you don't
(04:04):
have ice, you can't really have a cocktail. And one
of the punters said, prove it. And basically that's what
I've set out to try and do. And as soon
as I started to delving into it, I realized what
an extraordinary, rich seam of information it is, because it
(04:26):
is that big sort of unsung hero and monster of
modern life, and it's changing us. I think it's quite profound.
I was reading what was it last week? I think
that the eighth billion person has just been born on
planet Earth. This is, in those small part down to
(04:50):
the extraordinary benefits that ice have brought. Humanity, both in
terms of our nutrition, in terms of medicine, int of
so many things, is absolutely supercharged the species. It's from
nineteen forty five to now, the species has exploded, and
it is entirely down to the fact that we are
(05:14):
able to feed ourselves so much better because of refrigeration,
because of cool chains, because of all of the benefits
that ice has brought us, and what burden does that
place upon the rest of the system. And I think
that's the big question.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Yeah, you returned to the idea multiple times in the
book that ice is inherently linked to civilization, and you
frequently invoke the nineteen eighty six film adaptation of The
Mosquito Coast. Can you remind our listeners of this film,
and I suppose of the book and it's use of ice.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
I have to confess I've never read the book. I've
only ever seen the movie, which is a terrible admission.
I know Paol through as a wonderful writer, but I
haven't read it. But in the movie version, directed by
the wonderful Australia and director Peter Weir, the lead character
Ali Fox as played by Harrison Ford, has this very
(06:07):
catching line of ice is civilization and then sets out
into the rainforest of Belize to build an ice machine
to bring ice to the people. That idea has always
struck with me. I first saw that film. Gosh, this
dates me now. I saw that film on general release,
so gosh, that was what eighty six. As you said,
(06:27):
I think came out in eighty seven in the UK
because we were often at that point a little bit
behind the United States. But yes, I think that he
has an absolute point. Ice has always been there from
the very beginning of civilization. The ancient Sumerians, the very
first civilized society, had ice, which is something that is
(06:51):
quite baffling to grasp, given as in the City of
a Rook. The first city is in the deserts of
southern Iraq, and you know, were you to visit it today,
you'd find this barren, wind swept, desolate landscape and it's
very hard to imagine a that it was once a blossoming,
(07:13):
fertile place and b that they could make ice there
and it's baking, it's forty five degrees in the shade.
But ice was there. Ice was inherent in their lives.
We don't know how they use it. We just know
that it was there, which is a Zever. Often one
of the big problems with archaeological sources. They'll tell you
a thing, but they won't give you a context. But sorry,
(07:36):
I'm rabbiting on I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Rob, No, No, this is wonderful. Yeah, because that was
what I was going to ask about next, was the
ancient Samerian ice houses, because this was this really blue
meal way, just imagining.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Well, blue meal way too, I've got to be honest.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Yeah, So is it thought that the ancient Sumerians invented
ice house technology?
Speaker 3 (07:58):
We just know, like I was saying, you know, we
have in the year thirteen of the reign of Shulgi,
they built an ice house. That's what the tablet tells us.
And that's it. I'm not a Sumerian expert at all.
I had to read up on quite a lot of stuff,
and I still don't fully understand it. But when we
look at those kind of cuneiform tablets from the ancient
(08:22):
Middle and Near East, particularly as we get into the
next section of where ice rears its head, and a
kingdom called Mari, which was situated in eastern Syria around
about like the fifteen fourteen hundreds PC, they mentioned an
ice house in their tablets. But when we get to
that era, what we do have is an extraordinary level
(08:45):
of correspondence written between the great kingdoms of the Middle
and Near East, from the Hittites to the Assyrians, to
the Mari to the Egyptians, and they're all broadly in Assyrium,
and we have some of these archives. The one in
Mari was discovered in the thirties. It is a huge
(09:07):
insight into how that world operated and how it worked.
And these kings would sort of, you know, write to
each other, you know, to the great King of Assyria,
my brother, how how you doing, or that kind of thing.
But again, the ice house in Mari is mentioned obliquely.
(09:31):
We know that it was there. We don't know if
there was only one or if there were many in
their various different cities, but we know they had access
to ice, and we know again it was a luxury item.
It wasn't something that was there for everybody. It was
a prestige product.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
And you mentioned these various other ice houses and ice
pits that pop up in other civilizations. Does it seem
like this is a case of cultural transmission or it's
just kind of like independent inventions from people who or
people or kingdoms that are in areas where they have
access to snow and then are figuring out ways to
(10:15):
keep that snow around.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
You have to have access, I mean, when we look
at the Persian ice houses or yat calls, these are
specially designed structures that operate on evaporative cooling, and they
in those kind of desert environments where the temperature drops
incredibly fast and as the sun goes down, you can
(10:40):
create conditions in a controlled space where you can freeze things.
So that is a technology specific to their environments. And
we're talking seven hundred BC five hundred BC or thereabouts.
When you start looking at ancient Greece or civilizations like that,
they have access to ice from mountain and they will
(11:02):
bring the snow down. And we see this technology so
in Italy and in Spain into the early modern era,
and it doesn't really change a whole lot. You some
poor bloke generally a bloke has to carry the snow
down and a thing on his back. You pack it
(11:24):
down hard into the ground into a pit that's insulated
with branches and then covered and then sold. And you
could do this. You can do this in the Lebanon
because you can get the the ice from the mountains
at at the top of the Becker Valley. You can
do it in Greece. You can do it in Italy,
(11:45):
the Appennines was the big source of ice from Rome.
You can do it in Sudden Spain as host it
is in Seville. You still have mountains quite close by
where you should where you can get the ice from.
But if you don't have that access, it's not going
to happen. And India is quite an interesting one because
because because again they were able to do an evaporative
(12:06):
cooling technique with special ponds, and as the cooler would
come off the mountains, you could place clay pots out
and the walls would freeze and they would have ice
for the next day. But again, this is a short
lived resource. It's not going to to be around for
very long, and therefore is the preserve of the wealthy
(12:28):
for really up until the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Now you get into we get into this area where
there there, there, there is. There are more mentions of
of ice, and one that I thought was was particularly interesting.
You mentioned first century CE Roman philosopher Seneca again for
ice sold in Roman markets. Do it Do we know
why he disapproved?
Speaker 3 (12:55):
I think we don't know. I don't know why he
is Seneca from everything that I know, what little I
know of Senege, he was a fairly sniffy old chap
he was. He yes, he was a very proper fellow.
It was our Seneca which probably why Nero killed him.
(13:16):
Great philosopher, great writer, really really really disgusting playwright in
terms of the amount of blood and gore in his plays.
Oh my God, in his version of Madea you actually
see the babies being thrown from the battlements on stage.
I mean, Seneca's plays are mental. And Shakespeare was a
very big fan of Seneca's playwriting, which might explain explain
(13:41):
all the clart and gore and Coriolanus, but he was, Yeah, Seneca.
Shakespeare was a big fan of Seneca's dramaturgy. Uh, he's
he does, he does like to you know him, you
know juvenile as well. There are a bunch of those
guys around that first century who do like to have
quite snotty opinions about how awful the modern world is,
(14:04):
which I suppose is something that hasn't really changed. But yes,
he was not a fan of ice. He thought ice
was bad people and that they shouldn't be doing it,
which is an idea that would prevail for quite a
long time, for at least another sort of five six
hundred years after his time. There's a Spanish doctor Minardist
(14:24):
who's I think I mentioned the book, who writes about
how bad ice can be for you. There's an enormous
amount of ink and paper wasted on medical literature saying
that ice is a bad thing in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Yeah, I was intrigued by this the more I read
in the book, too, because initially I was also reminded
of some traditions I think in like Chinese traditional medicine,
the idea that one should drink hot water as opposed
to chilled water. But then later on in the book
you also mention issues concerning the potential contamination of snow
(15:02):
with dirt. That later the idea that you could you
could have actual outbreaks due to contamination of.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
A lot of the We were talking about the Roman
stuff and all earlier on a lot of that ice
that was sold in those markets in ancient Greece, ancient
Romes actually snow compacted snow, and that contains inherently particles
of dirt and mud and bits. Where the market evolves
(15:34):
into thanks to a brilliant Bostonian guy called Frederick Tudor,
is the export of hand cut ice from lakes in
New England. And these are blocks of solid ice, and
solid ice is very much more pure than compacted snow,
and they were shipping this all around the world from
(15:58):
Tudor started in eighteen oh six and finally really got
it figured out in the eighteen twenties after the War
of eighteen twelve. Was you know, that kind of put
the kaibosh on him for a while. But as the
demand increases, you have two problems. The first is you
(16:19):
want to make more ice faster for your stores. So
they would do this thing which is called sinking the well,
whereby having cut a bunch of ice out, they would
also drill extra holes in the top of a pond
or lake so that the water would well up and refreeze.
But what that would do would it would capture your
footprints between the original layer that you were walking on
(16:40):
and the water that welled up, so there would be
dirt trapped within the ice, which was not exactly pleasing
to the customer. But the bigger problem, as you point out,
as time goes on is pollution, and the uptake of
ice usage runs parallel alongside with the industrial revolution and
(17:04):
the various pourings of industrial waste human waste into the
waterways which were then being harvested for ice, and one
of the most awful cases. There was a mental hospital
in upstate New York that used to cut its ice
from the river downstream of where their effluent pipe ran
(17:27):
in and a number of people died. And this is
kind of the beginning of the end for natural ice
as a commercial proposition.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Now, now, thus far far, I know a lot of
listeners are probably you know, we're talking about the use
of this ice.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
And hello, listeners.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Use is kind of a kind of a novelty. And
I know, I'm imagining drinks with ice in them, drinks
with bits of snow in them, and you get into this.
This is a really fun part of the book too,
talking about like a Florentine wine a chilling back in
the thirteen forty. Yeah, so I was thinking about that.
But then, of course another important iced treat comes up,
(18:03):
And then of course is ice cream. Yes, where do
we seem to find like the oldest possible evidence of
ice cream in the world.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
There's a lot of mythology wrapped up with ice cream.
So stories tell us that ice cream was invented in
China and that it was the privilege and unique dessert
of the Imperial Court and nobody else could have it.
(18:32):
And then the apocrypha goes on to say that Marco
Polo brought the recipe back to Italy. This absolute the latter,
It is absolutely rot. Or whether the Chinese we're eating
ice cream as opposed to of cooled, chilled things. That's
kind of hard to pin down. But ice cream in
the European context doesn't happen until the seventeenth century. There's
(18:58):
a lovely sort of piece of mythology that Catherine de Medici,
when she was married to the Dauphin of France, brought
the recipe and all kinds of other recipes with her
into France and transformed French cooking. But this is absolutely rot.
For one reason, she was thirteen fourteen and probably not
(19:18):
wildly interested in recipes at the time and would have
been stripped of all things Italian at the border. For another,
the science of how do you make cream freeze was
not known in Europe at that point, although it was
known in other parts of the world, and it crops up.
There's a twelfth century Indian Treaties which describes how to
(19:39):
do it, and it basically involves making a brine solution
within which to freeze your cream. The thing is cream
freezes about half a degree lower than water, so even
if you just put it in ice, you're just going
to end up with cold cream. So you've got to
find a way to make the chilling snow even colder,
(20:03):
and the best way to do that is to add
a shed load of salt to it. Brine freezes at
are much lower temperature, so you can get the surrounding
liquid down to about minus sixteen celsius and then you
have a chance of churning your cream into ice cream.
And Europeans did not figure this out for quite a
long time. I think part of the reason being that
(20:24):
salt was so expensive. This is one of the things
that is quite hard for us to grasp today because
you know, you go into the store and you can
buy a packet of kosher salt for less than a dollar.
The idea of salt being a prestige and expensive commodity
is something that battles us now. But it was, and
(20:47):
it was highly taxed as well. It was very highly taxed,
and so as good as ice cream tastes, even if
you know the science, you're not going to waste the
salt on it. If that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Because I'm just thinking to my own
experiences with making ice cream, like you end up using
a fair amount of salt, Like during it is like
a whole box of rock salt too.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Oh at least absolutely absolutely, do you handshen in one
of those old fashioned.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Oh no, I say that we tried. At one point,
we tried this device. It was like a ball and
the idea is you fill it up and then children
will play with the ball and that will eventually produce
ice cream via the churning. But we found that it's
a little too much to ask for children to continually
play with the ball that long, so it ends up
the adults just have to roll it back and forth
across the ground until it becomes ice cream.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
We have, imagine makes ice cream machine. We kind of
on the cheats way, but it works.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
So coming back to opinions against chilled beverages, how did
the medieval world view the consumption of chilled beverages? And
then where do we see that, like, where do we
see a shift in general opinion of chilled beverages and
so forth?
Speaker 3 (22:05):
Oh man, you'll bring in the big questions today, aren't you. Okay,
So in the medieval world, ice is certainly very present,
and we we know that particularly in the Middle East,
ice was was very popular. We we know stories of
salad There's a lovely myth about Saladein sending a sack
(22:28):
of ice to Richard the third when so Richard the
first and Richard the First was ill, probably not true.
We know again with Saladein there's the fantastic story of
him killing a guy called Raymond de Chatillon because Raymond
took a glass of iced rose water out of Saladein's
(22:52):
hand and drank it when it wasn't given to him,
and Saladin kills him stone dead, which is a scene
that crops up in Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, which
interesting movie. Original release cut, not very good, the director's cut,
which has an extra forty five minutes of stuff, and
it is actually quite the movie, and that scene is
(23:14):
very powerful. So we know the ice is very present,
and we know that people argue about whether it's good
for people or not. You always have your senecan kind
of people cropping up saying oh, you know, the party
poopers saying no, we shouldn't have any ice. But it's there,
is there is current, it's present, and it's as I said,
(23:38):
before is the preserve of the wealthy. As to whether
there's a shift or not of acceptance, I don't think
he never wasn't accepted. I just think that there were
your dissenters in literature who happen to be writing about it,
and their books survive. With a product like ice. The
(23:58):
fans aren't gonna buy they're writing, the dissenters will because
that sells. And twas ever, thus even you know, before
the invention of the printing press. So the people who
are who are writing and dissenting are are I think,
I think in the minority. I can't prove that because
there's just not enough information upon which to make a judgment.
(24:19):
But that's my hunch.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Okay, yeah, I mean it. It squares with a lot
of what we've been talking about with taking ice for granted.
And you know, unless you have an issue with it,
or in I guess in our experiences, unless there's a
problem in actually acquiring it, then you begin to realize
how how marvelous it.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Is well well exactly, and and you sort of see
that in the tropics, you know, people. That's why Frederick
Tudor hit on such a genius idea when he started
shipping it to the Caribbean and then further afield because
you had no ready source. I mean in Jamaica. I'm
I'm half Jamaica. My mother's from Antika Bay. We have
(25:01):
the beautiful blue mountains. But they don't get snow on
them that i'm they're high enough. But you know it's
too tropical, it's never going to happen.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
So let's let's get back to cocktails. I was, I
was very excited when you brought it up. I almost
wanted to shift ahead to the cocktail discussion at that point.
But yeah, yeah, to your point, like we think about
about mixed beverages especially, and we instantly think about ice,
we may and then there's so many ways to add ice,
(25:30):
you know, particular shames of cube, the different sort of
grains of crushed ice. Do you have a particular favorite.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Well, it depends on what the drink is, to be
honest with you, If it's like us of old fashioned,
a nice large, big cube, you know, if if it's
something else, then that they're may be a bit more crushed.
I'm a big fan of a good stirred martini.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
I know that some cocktail enthusiasts are so wild for
the for the pearl ice, or sometimes called here in
the States, that the sonic ice that I've seen memes about,
Like you're about leaving the bar if the if that
particular grain of ice is not available.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
I think that that's I think that's a little ponsi
if we're I mean, I'm a dive bar kind of
a guy, so you know, I'm not that fussed about
about it. But that said, that said, I do have
a friend in Los Angeles, a barkeep there, and he
designs ice.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
And he has an ice business and makes bespoke cubes
of various shapes, these beautiful sort of globes of ice
that are about like three inches across, and they're wonderful,
wonderful things. You can't help but be impressed by that.
But I'm a simple boy. But let's talk. But let's
talk cocktails, Rob, come on, where's the big question? Let's
(26:52):
go all right?
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Well, eventually you also you bring up Jerry Thomas's eighteen
sixty two Bartenders Guys, Yes.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
One of Will's great book. Well, he only mentions ice
once in the book, and he says in the introduction
he says ice should be wiped clean and set aside,
and then he doesn't mention it again beyond the fact
that it's in all the recipes, but he doesn't talk
about ice again. It's such a commonplace by the time
(27:21):
he writes that book. It's ridiculous. This was this You
asked me earlier on about the way into this book.
And you know, I've done my time in Bars. I
worked in Bars when I was a student to pay
my way through college and all the rest of it.
So I've had Jerry Thomas on my shelf for a
long time because I've had the book for so long,
(27:42):
I suppose this kind of blew my mind. It was like, what, wait, Jerry,
where's the ice? What the hell is going on? Man?
I just you know, I couldn't quite get my head
around it. Eighteen sixty two, he writes that Frederick Tudor
starts trading his eyes out to Boston in eighteen o six.
(28:02):
That gap of time, what's that fifty four years? Fifty
six years? My mass is atrocious. Please forgive me. Ice
has become every day it's become an ordinary, unremarkable thing.
And this to me blows my actual mind.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Yeah, I found myself wondering if it was just like
ice was ice at that point then. There just hadn't
been a lot of innovation. It was just you were
sort of happy to have what you had or.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
No, well, the innovation is is mister Tudor. And he
starts shipping, like I just said, in eighteen oh six
to Martinique, which doesn't go very well for him. He
hasn't got his his organization fully sorted, he hasn't got
an ice house built there to receive his cargo. It
largely melts on the dock. So he tries again the
(28:55):
next year, and he goes to Cuba, and that goes
rather better, but then start going a bit awright. He
manages the the first few years. The War of eighteen
twelve starts in of course, as its name suggests, eighteen twelve,
the seas are closed. The seas were closed earlier than that,
(29:17):
in eighteen oh seven, because the Americans didn't want to
have their seamen captured by the British impressed into the
British Navy who were fighting the French at that time.
So there was a whole thing going on with that
which made it quite tricky for him. He gets into terrible, terrible,
terrible debt to the extent that he's sent to prison
for it, and his father manages to get some people
(29:40):
together and have a whip bround and they bail him out,
and he gets back into business and he starts I
think it's Charleston first, and then Savannah in the South,
he starts shipping ice. And he also he doesn't just
ship ice to these places. He also invents ice bots
(30:00):
for our domestic use, which would put a lump of
ice on the top and you can keep your milky cheese,
your fish or whatever nice and cool. But his real
innovation is that he realizes that the gateway to the
ice business is drinks an ice cream. So whenever he
(30:21):
arrives in a place, when he arrives in Savannah, when
he arrives in Charleston in nineteen twenty four, when he
arrives in New Orleans, he gives the ice away to
bartenders for at least the first sort of period of time.
Because his theory is he writes one of his letters
to a guy called Stephen Cabot, who is managing one
of his ice operations in the Caribbean, is that I'm
(30:44):
going to paraphrase, I'm not going to quite quote this accurately.
He says, if a man has had his drink cold
for one week, he will not go back to having
it warm. And he's not wrong, particularly in those kind
of climates. And so you know, that's when the sort
(31:06):
of the ice cube gets into the old fashioned I
think is that is around that very era. I mean,
you know, nineteen twenty four he gets to New Orleans.
That's to me the birth of the cocktail right there.
He was brilliant. He was shipping to India by eighteen
thirty three, he was shipping to Australia by eighteen thirty five.
(31:28):
This is all hand carved ice from lakes in New
England going around the world. And it's one of those
brilliantly battling moments of history that's completely forgotten because we
don't need it anymore. But you know, there's this one
brilliant thing I think I reference reference it in the book.
(31:50):
I think about eighteen thirty seven, the ice supply dries
up in Calcutta, when the place goes nuts. All these
people are just going, you know, where is it? Their
editorials written in the newspaper saying, where has our ice gone?
How can we function like this, you know, and it's
(32:11):
kind of brilliant. So yes, because of Tudor's brilliance and
his determination to come into a place, bring a load
of ice, snack it up and sell it cheap and
turn it from being this luxury commodity for the wealthy
into an everyday necessity. And I think this is the
big thing. Is he makes it quittidian, he makes it ordinary.
(32:34):
He makes it something you cannot function without. That's why
Jerry Thomas is able to just say ice should be
washed and set aside, because to him is it is
now ordinary, and even as it is transforming his customer's experience,
even it is in eighteen sixty two beginning to form
(33:00):
the basis of the very first cool chains in the
United States, with big, massive locks of ice being strung
in hammocks in train cabins, over meat and vegetables, it
is now an everyday thing. And that's exactly the kind
of stuff that people don't write about, and it's exactly
(33:21):
why it's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
So coming back to wine a bit. We touched on
chilled wine earlier. How long does it seem like we've
been enjoying chilled wine? And and and I don't know.
I also can't help but think about the fact that, yes,
we still have for the most part, red wines are
not chilled.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
Or they shouldn't be. There was there was briefly a
fashion in Britain in some point in the nineteenth century
if a chilling red wine, which is an abominable thing
to do, And I honestly don't know what they were thinking.
I'm frankly ashamed of them. But I think that the
chilling of wine is something that has gone on for ages.
(34:12):
We have in Athanaeus's book, I can never pronounce this, right,
I'm going to try the depth nonstropistai. He records a
story of the comic play right, diphilis going around for
dinner with this woman called good Natheia, and she has
(34:32):
snow that's been sent by one of her lovers, brought
in to chill the wine. So that's you know, nearly
you know, two thy five hundred years ago. I think
that humans have always liked a cold, refreshing drink. I
think that it's just part of who we are. It's
just that we haven't had access to it for the
(34:56):
vast bulk of our history. And with wine in particular.
We know the Tuscans were very keen on chilling their
white wines down in the middle part Lost millennium. We
can attest to that. And God knows, those lovely flinty
whites that they make are beautiful and nicely iced and cold,
(35:18):
so they clearly knew what they were doing.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Now, the book explores so many other exciting fields, and
you get into space exploration, medicine, the food supply chain.
There's a lot more invention history in there. And then
there's even I was I was surprised and delight about
there's a whole chapter on the Terror and the Erebus. Yeah,
and part I was excited at that because I very
(35:43):
recently watched that that adaptation of Dan Simon's novel The Terror.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Oh, I haven't seen that yet. I'm looking forward to that.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Oh I have not read the original book, so I
can't compare it to that. But my wife and I
loved it. Thought it was terrific, wonderful performance.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
It's it's such a fascinating story and there's so much
that we just don't know about what happened to these
poor men. It is ghastly how poorly equipped and badly
prepared these men were sent into the answer. If the
(36:21):
boats had survived, arguably the men would but you know,
as Captain Willard tells us in Apocalypse, now never get
off the boat.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Yeah, even though, like like you point out in the
in in the book that you know they were they
had a lot of very advanced technology. They had these
sort of steam powered vessels, but.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
They did they had, they were They were among the
first ships in the British Navy fitted with steam engines
that were retractable. They had retractable propellers, They had chimneys
that they even had a rubber dinghy. And they had
a monkey called Jacko, who by all accounts was an
absolute bastard. They had a dog called Old Napp who
was beloved by all letters that that that that came
(37:03):
back before they they finally went into the Arctic tell
us that Old nep was. It was a big crew favorite.
They had a vast library. They were incredibly ahead of
the curve in terms of their awareness of the need
to take care of the men's mental health should they
be frozen in and this is one of the things
(37:23):
they absolutely got right. The real problem for them is
their cold weather clothes were largely made of wool, which
is in fact the most terrible insulator if you're in
an Arctic environment, because you know you do the work
needs to be done, you sweat into the wool. Then
you stop working, you start getting cold, and the sweat
(37:44):
in the wolf freezes and this is a problem, and
nobody thought to ask the locals, apart weirdly from the
guy who was the first person to report back news
of what happened to the Franklin expedition, and explorer called
John Ray, who was a Scottish guy. He was a surveyor,
(38:05):
he was a surgeon. He's probably the only Arctic explorer
of the era from the UK who never got a
knight head. And he was the one guy who learned
how to speak to the Inuit and learned how to
move like the Inuit, dressed like the Inuit, survive hunt
exist in that fashion, and he is largely unique amongst
(38:32):
those nineteenth century polar explorers. And he was the one
guy who got the first, the first stories, the first
Inuit testimony of what happened to the men of the
Franklin expedition, as tragic as it was, and was rubbished
for his efforts by no lesser author than the ghastly
Charles Dickens, who, really, you know, was I can't talk.
(38:58):
I need to stop talking about Dickens. I can't stand
the man. He's been the bane of my life since school.
I can't read his stuff. He's a racist bastard. I
can't stand him.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yeah, I wasn't familiar with I wasn't familiar with the
history of dickens involvement in all of them.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
He was a great friends with Lady Jane Franklin, John
Franklin's widow, And when the Ray Report came in, which
told terrible stories of anthropophagy and starvation and enormous suffering,
he basically took to his magazine outlet, a periodical called
(39:35):
Household Words, to lambast these stories and basically say it
must have been the barbarous Inuit who 't our brave,
noble naval officers, rather than the meeting themselves. And he
couldn't He couldn't countenance the idea that a oral society
(40:00):
could know something and tell us something that might be
useful to him. That was preposterous because they couldn't write
anything down. Therefore, they're absolutely useless, in his opinion, and
he writes this stuff down, and you know, we tend
to remember his novels, which I find verbose and quite dull,
(40:22):
but generally speaking quite open hearted. His journalism not so much.
His journalism betrays the full on Victorian that he and
he can be both things at once. I mean, you know, yes,
and I was, weirdly, I was talking to a friend
on the phone earlier on the Only bit of Dickens
(40:44):
that I actually like is the David Lean film Great Expectations,
which I think is a tremendous movie and a brilliant
bit of storytelling. But one of the main reasons why
it's a brilliant bit of storytelling he doesn't have all
that bloody verbiage in it, and Lean is brilliant at
his image selection and everything else. It's a fantastic and
(41:05):
very disturbing movie. But Dickens and me, we're not friends.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
So cannibalism Charles Dickens cocktails space exploration. You cover a
lot of ground in this book. Was there any area
in particular that you've found your self surprised that you
were going to be covering? Like, well, I didn't think
I was going to be writing about this in my book,
but here, I am, well.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
I have to confess you've mentioned space exploration. I was
going to do a chat space exploration and then I
was late on my deadline and I didn't do it.
So sadly that's not in maybe if there's a sequel.
But the winter sports stuff, yes, was very interesting to me,
particularly the Jean Claude Killi stuff and the way he
(41:53):
became such a marketing phenomenon in the United States in
the early seventies and reading the Hunter Thompson article about him.
That was really interesting because it never occurred to me
I'm in part I mean, I'm godly I'm fifty now
and so when when I was a kid, ski coverage
(42:15):
was just beginning to happen on British television. We had
this show called magazine show called Ski Sunday, and it
would cover all the big races in Europe and it
was tremendously exciting and we were gripped. We only had
three channels, so we didn't have a great deal of choice,
but it was fantastic stuff. The medical chapter as well,
(42:37):
was was was eye opening, particularly Samuel Tillischman's Tisherman's Sorry,
his work on trying to freeze down the body of
a trauma patient as quickly as possible to try and
stop the brain damage before you can stop the bleeding.
The biggest problem that you have should you be shot
(43:01):
or stabbed is bleeding out and the organ failure that
then follows. And what he's trying to do, and he's
just going into the second phase of clinical trials right now,
is to work out a way that you get the
patient into the emergency room and you chill them right
down as fast as you can to protect the brain
and to protect the heart, so you can then get
(43:23):
in and you have time to deal with whatever the
traumatic issue is that is causing the blood loss. And
this is absolutely cutting edge stuff. And when I started
writing that chapter, I had no idea that mister Tischerman existed.
Doctor Tischman. That absolutely blows my mind. It's extraordinary. I
(43:44):
stumbled into that chapter because I saw a documentary back
in the nineties about using hypothermia in open heart surgery
and how it hadn't quite worked out, but it was
the history of the early state of open heart surgery
and how chilling the patient and using hypothermia was really
(44:05):
the best way to stop the heart jumping about before
somebody invents the bypass machine, and so I was fascinated
by the idea of how you can use hypothermia in
a therapeutical setting. Nothing prepared me for what doctor Tishman
is up to, and it is the most astounding stuff
and if it works, it's going to genuinely transform trauma medicine.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yeah, remarkable stuff, especially comparing it to the earlier parts
of the book where you're talking about the experiences of
freezing to death. I've been very fortunate to never experience
that myself. When you're talking about like the phase you
reach where you're like, oh, I'm actually quite warm. I
need to strip a few layers off.
Speaker 3 (44:47):
I know it's mad, And actually, when you read the accounts,
it actually doesn't seem like such a bad way to go,
you know. Apparently it's quite a trippy high, you know that.
I not that I want to freeze the dead, but
if there's an option, you know, that doesn't seem like
one of the worst ways in which one can step
(45:09):
off this mortal coil.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
All right, well, Fred, thanks for taking the time out
of your day to chat with me about the book.
The book again is of ice and men. How we've
Used Cold to Transform Humanity. As of this publication of
this initial publication of this episode, the book is out
in the US, and I think correct me if I'm wrong,
but it's coming out in the UK in the next
couple of months in February. Okay, excellent. Well, I greatly
(45:34):
enjoyed it. I highly recommend it to all of our listeners.
I think everyone out there will enjoy the book.
Speaker 3 (45:39):
Well, thank you so much, Robert. I've really enjoyed talking
to you this evening.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
All right, thank you, take Cam out. Thanks again to
Fred Again. The book is of ice and Men, how
We've used cold to transform humanity. Highly recommend you check
it out. There's a little something in here for everybody,
just a wonderful exploration of something that you may taking
for granted right now. I didn't even think about it,
(46:03):
but throughout the interview, I of course had at an
entire container of iced water, chilled water, right next to me,
and I didn't even think about the connection. Thanks as
always to Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show. And
if you would like to reach out to me or
to Joe, any of us here at the show, you
can shoot us an email at contact at Stuff to
(46:25):
Blow Your Mind dot com.
Speaker 4 (46:35):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
(47:00):
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