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