He was Frederic Tudor, surely one of most remarkable businessmen of the nineteenth century. Tudor was a diminutive, pig-headed Bostonian who dedicated most of his working life to supplying ice to the tropics. He suffered the humiliation of bankruptcy, was jailed for debt, endured a mental breakdown, but came through it all to father six children after the age of fifty and to die in 1864, aged eighty, a wealthy man with a country estate. At no time did Tudor, or any of those who became his competitors in the ice business, make use of artificial refrigeration. With one or two trivial exceptions, all the ice marketed in Tudor’s lifetime was ‘harvested’ from lakes and rivers which froze in the winter. In the holds of ships the ice was preserved through many days, and even weeks, sailing through tropical heat by the insulation of sawdust supplied by timber mills in Maine.
The ice trade was carried on in a century of great inventions – the electric telegraph, railways, steam-driven machines of all kinds, and gas and electric light. It continued long after Tudor’s death, into the age of petrol engines and electric trams. As late as 1907 New York, by then the quintessential modern city of skyscrapers and motor cars, was absolutely reliant on natural ice harvested from lakes and rivers, including the Hudson, and on imports of Kennebec River ice sent by ship from Maine. When winter weather was mild, the New York Times would warn of an ice ‘famine’ the following summer, and every year newspaper articles would appear promising an end to the reliance on harvested ice.
Frederic Tudor had not anticipated that the trade he began would lead to such ice-addiction among his fellow Americans. From the time he first shipped lake ice to the West Indies in 1806 to the beginnings of the Calcutta trade in the 1830s, he clung to one conviction: people living in tropical climates would pay a good price for ice if they could get it. The inhabitants of Havana in Cuba, and the British sweltering in Calcutta, could make ice cream, cool their drinks and relieve their suffering from fevers with ice harvested from the clear waters of New England’s many spring-fed ponds. They could even enjoy crisp Baldwin apples from the orchards of Massachusetts, and fresh churned butter, which Tudor packed in barrels and stowed alongside the ice.
The techniques Tudor and his employees developed for cutting, storing and shipping ice were in time adopted across all the areas of North America where winters were hard enough to produce a saleable crop. Ice was shipped down the eastern seaboard and carried across the continent in insulated railroad cars to satisfy the ever-growing demands of the first nation in history to enjoy refrigeration not as a luxury for the rich but as an everyday necessity for a very wide section of its population.
There had been earlier ice trades. In the sixteenth century, the mountain ranges which surround the Mediterranean and are high enough to remain snow-capped in summer provided refrigeration for those living on the torrid coasts. Snow and ice gathered on the upper slopes of the mountains was packed in straw baskets and brought down the winding Alpine tracks on donkeys. A similar trade had existed in South America for centuries, and continues in some places to this day. Wherever there were accessible mountains which carried summer snow, and towns close enough to provide a market for it, there was likely to be an ice trade. But the American industry was on a much larger scale, and was far more sophisticated than anything before it.
The harvest, which lasted for a few weeks, usually between January and March, took place across that huge region of North America where the winters are hard enough to freeze lakes and rivers solid. Whether it was on the Hudson River, one of the New England ponds, the Kennebec River in Maine or in the mid-west, it presented the same extraordinary winter tableau, and in many places drew crowds of spectators.
After a week or so of sub-zero temperatures, soundings would be taken to check the thickness of the ice. If it had frozen to a depth of eighteen inches or more it was ready – strong enough to support the weight of hundreds of men and horses, and thick enough to yield good-sized cubes of ice.
Migrant workers who lodged close to the frozen lakes and rivers joined local farmworkers to make up teams of ice harvesters. Blacksmiths shod the heavy horses with spiked shoes. The men wore boots with cork soles so they could get a grip on the ice, and wrapped their legs in layers of cloth to protect them from the cold. All the while they watched the weather: a warm spell could quickly ruin the ice, while a fall of snow might delay the cutting, for the ice would have to be cleared with horse-drawn scrapers before its surface could be marked out. Often they worked at night by torchlight. Ice was valuable, and competing ice companies working on the same lake or river had to observe boundaries: ownership was established by buying sections of shoreline, on which huge timber ice stores were built.
Once a favourable area of ice was established and the snow cleared to reveal the crystal surface of the ice, it could be marked out. This was generally the work of men who steered iron cutters drawn by teams of two horses across the surface, creating parallel lines in one direction and then, working at right angles to the first cuts, another set of parallel lines, so that the whole area to be cut was divided up into regular squares. The favoured size of the cubes varied according to the market for which the ice was destined. Blocks for India or the West Indies were the largest, those destined for American cities often smaller – a ‘New York’ ice cube was twenty-two inches square.
When the surface was marked out, horse-drawn ploughs with metal teeth cut far enough down into the first grooves to enable men with long-handled chisels to prise the blocks free. The giant ice cubes were then coaxed along channels of free water to a mechanism which hoisted them into the timber ice-house. Loading was from the top, the blocks sliding down a chute from which they were hauled into regular stacks, like huge building blocks. Sawdust was put between and around the blocks as insulation. Stacked like that awaiting shipment, the ice cubes were able to survive for several years, shrinking slowly through each summer and refreezing in winter.
Before the building of railroads to transport it, ice was carried from the stores to a port or nearby town in wagons drawn by teams of horses or oxen. From there most of it was moved by ship, and could not be carried until the spring thaw: on the Hudson, specially designed barges carried the ice down to New York. In city centres huge ice warehouses provided depots from which ice was distributed to customers. In the home Americans kept blocks of ice cut to a standard size in what were called refrigerators or ice-boxes – there are people living in rural areas who still remember these very well. It took a number of years to perfect the design of these containers for storing ice, for this proved to be technically difficult. Refrigerators were chiefly built of wood and lined with metal inside, with different compartments for keeping food fresh. Those who could afford it had a fresh block of ice delivered daily, for which they paid a weekly or monthly subscription.
American ice was crystal clear, and considered clean enough to put directly into drinks, a custom which was novel to Europeans in the nineteenth century. Before the Civil War of the 1860s the mint juleps of New Orleans and other southern cocktails were made with ice shipped down from Boston, and the abundance of natural ice which could be delivered daily made it possible for Americans to enjoy home-made ice cream right through the summer. This required an additional piece of equipment, for it is impossible to freeze liquids simply by immersing them in ice; a bit of alchemy is required. It had been discovered centuries earlier, possibly in China, that a mixture of salt and ice will draw heat from a metal container immersed in it and reduce the temperature inside it to below zero. If a liquid is put into the container it will freeze solid. To make ice cream with a pleasing, light texture it is important to stir the cream as it freezes. Nineteenth-century ice-cream-making machines therefore included a paddle