ice, history of its use. The art of preserving ice formed in winter so that it can be used to cool drinks in the heat of summer is almost as old as civilization itself: it was already old in 1780 bce, when Zimri-Lim, king of the Mesopotamian city of Mari, claimed to have built the world’s first dedicated ice house, where blocks of it were stored under an insulating layer of tamarisk branches. The use of snow and ice to cool wine was a feature of Greek and Roman civilization, to the point that it was sold in the marketplaces. Iced drinks were well known in Persia and China and Mughal India. In Europe, the great specialists in iced drinks were the Italians, going back at least to the Renaissance. And indeed, it was Italian limonadiers—specialists in Italian iced sherbets—in France who first seem to have united ice and distilled spirits when they began making delicate iced punches (attested to as early as 1765). See punch. That got the French finally to appreciate punch, a drink they had previously rejected as crude and English.
It took Americans, however, to make the combination of ice and spirits not just known but customary. Already in 1784, just as the Parisian limonadiers were perfecting their punches, one Archibald McElroy was advertising “Ice Punch” in the Philadelphia newspapers. By 1810, when the Almanach des gourmands was advising its Parisian readers that the best “Punch glacé” in town was to be found at the Café Tortoni, Ice Punch was being sold in New York and Boston (where it was a specialty of Othello Pollard, a pioneering African American caterer), and taverns in Virginia were selling iced Mint Juleps.
It is true that one could sometimes find iced punch in London too, either at the Prince Regent’s residence (he was a devotee) or at the occasional grand public banquet, such as the one at Vauxhall gardens in 1813 where 1,300 people sat down to a dinner accompanied by wines and “iced punch.” See Regent’s Punch. In Europe, however, iced drinks were a luxury. In America, they were an everyday thing. (There were already technical differences between American iced drinks and European ones: the latter were usually bottled and then iced, preventing the drink from having direct contact with the ice, which was often of dubious quality; in America, drinks were built right on the ice, so that in a bowl of punch it would provide both chilling and dilution.)
The modern ice trade began in 1806 when Frederic Tudor (1783–1864), a visionary and persistent Yankee merchant, shipped a cargo of Boston ice to Martinique. By the 1820s, Tudor was regularly supplying ice to New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, and a number of Caribbean ports. His competitors, of whom there would be many, took care of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the other sweltering cities of the Mid-Atlantic States. Between them, Tudor and the others created the necessary technology—from horse-drawn ice cutters to steam-powered block hoists—to harvest the thick, clean ice with which the frigid New England winters covered every pond and river and ship the heavy, half-meter square blocks as far away as Calcutta. For every step of their journey they traveled under insulation, from harvest to deposit in the customer’s new “refrigerator.”
cobbler; Cock-Tail; and julep.The 1840s also saw this new-model American bar exported, with examples appearing in Paris and London. That of course required unusual amounts of ice, at least by European standards. In Britain, those were largely sourced from Wenham Lake in Massachusetts and Rockland Lake in New York, at least until Norwegian entrepreneurs set up American-style ice harvesting outside of Oslo.
Natural ice was not without its problems. The source could be polluted, increasingly common as the United States industrialized. Worse, the supply could fail entirely, whether from a warm winter (such as the one of 1828, which saw Tudor scrambling and one of his ship captains hack up a floating Arctic iceberg to fulfill his Martinique contracts), an extra-hot summer, or some fault in the chain of transmission.
Beginning in the 1860s, the massive American natural-ice industry, which had spread from coast to coast, began to receive competition from steam-driven artificial ice makers. As the technology of artificial ice improved, it gradually displaced natural ice, without changing the business much from the consumer end: ice was still delivered in large blocks well into the twentieth century. Bartenders still had to know how to break down the blocks, and they still had the ability to cut ice in different sizes to go with different drinks. Only after the Second World War did it become standard for bars (and home mixologists, for that matter) to make their own ice. At first, this came in cold, hard cubes. By the 1960s, however, machines had been introduced that made ice in cloudy chips or elongated rings, shapes that froze quickly and filled a glass easily, but also melted in no time and had little appeal to the eye. See ice machine. Gresham’s law saw to it that by the 1980s this style of ice had come to dominate the marketplace, in the United States and—since the postwar years had seen much of the rest of the world adapt to using ice, if not on an American level, then at least to a far greater one than before—practically everywhere else as well, with the admirable exception of Japan. See Japan.
One of the core tenets of the twenty-first-century cocktail renaissance was that ice was important—that one could not make good drinks without good ice. This led, among other things, to a revival of the fortunes of the Kold Draft company, maker of (admittedly temperamental) ice machines that supplied the large, cold, and hard cubes of yore. Some bartenders and mixologists made ice their special study, working with full-scale blocks and learning anew how to break them down to produce ice of any desired size and shape. In 2010, Richard Boccato, a Milk & Honey alumnus and owner of the highly regarded Queens, New York, bar Dutch Kills, went so far as to install a full-scale Clinebell ice-block maker in the basement of Weather Up, a Manhattan bar he was working with. He was the first to do so, but he would not be the last. See Clinebell ice machine and Milk & Honey. It is only a matter of time before horse ploughs are once again quartering the frozen ponds of Massachusetts.
See also cocktail and ice carving.
David, Elizabeth. Harvest of the Cold Months. New York: Viking, 1994.
Smith, Philip Chadwick Foster. Crystal Blocks of Yankee Coldness. Wenham, MA: Wenham Historical Association and Museum, 1962.
Wondrich, David. Imbibe!, 2nd. ed. New York: Perigee, 2015.
By: David Wondrich