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