Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks--a Cool History of a Hot Commodity - Hardcover

Brady, Amy

 
9780593422199: Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks--a Cool History of a Hot Commodity
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593422198 ISBN 13: 9780593422199
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

The unexpected and unexplored ways that ice has transformed a nation—from the foods Americans eat, to the sports they play, to the way they live today—and what its future might look like on a swiftly warming planet.

Ice is everywhere: in gas stations, in restaurants, in hospitals, in our homes. Americans think nothing of dropping a few ice cubes into tall glasses of tea to ward off the heat of a hot summer day. Most refrigerators owned by Americans feature automatic ice machines. Ice on-demand has so revolutionized modern life that it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way—and to overlook what aspects of society might just melt away as the planet warms.

In Ice, journalist and historian Amy Brady shares the strange and storied two-hundred-year-old history of ice in America: from the introduction of mixed drinks “on the rocks,” to the nation’s first-ever indoor ice rink, to how delicacies like ice creams and iced tea revolutionized our palates, to the ubiquitous ice machine in every motel across the US. But Ice doesn’t end in the past. Brady also explores the surprising present-day uses of ice in sports, medicine, and sustainable energy—including cutting-edge cryotherapy breast-cancer treatments and new refrigerator technologies that may prove to be more energy efficient—underscoring how precious this commodity is, especially in an age of climate change.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amy Brady is the executive director and publisher of Orion magazine and coeditor of The World as We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate. Brady has made appearances on the BBC, NPR, and PBS. She holds a PhD in literature and American studies and has won writing and research awards from the National Science Foundation, the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the Library of Congress.

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Chapter 1

The Man Who Would Be Ice King

The history of America's obsession with ice is much like the history of America itself: steeped in myth, given shape by acts of defiance, powered by commercial interests, and driven by bold yet deeply flawed men with visions that would change the world. It could be said to begin in Boston on September 4, 1783, just a day after the Revolutionary War ended, when Delia Jarvis Tudor gave birth to her third son, Frederic Tudor. No one could have known it then, but Frederic would one day spark a revolution of another kind: a revolution in how Americans think of and use ice.

The sun was shining the day I visited the site where Tudor's childhood home once stood. A couple of blocks over, I could see Boston's Old State House, where his father, a high-ranking judge named William Tudor Sr., would have hobnobbed with merchants and met senators for midday drinks. Not far to the north is the Bell in Hand Tavern, opened in 1795 and purportedly the nation's oldest bar, whose cocktails today, clinking with ice, are an unacknowledged tribute to Tudor's influence. In 1806, Tudor would have walked a half mile east from here to the harbor, where he'd set sail on the first American ship to carry blocks of ice on the open sea. Forty years later, he would stand in that same spot and, spitting curses, toss his wife's belongings into the water.

I went to Boston to better understand this man who was crowned the "Ice King" by the city's newspapers for his success in launching the American ice trade. He was a man, I would learn, of many contradictions: a fortune seeker who frequently spent more than he made; a charming salesman with a violent temper; a shortsighted businessman but also a visionary. Where his Bostonian peers were skeptical of a plan to make money off something as common and, well, free as Massachusetts lake ice, Frederic wrote to potential investors asking for the capital to harvest what only he saw as a bounty to then sell in warm climates around the world. Almost everyone, except a few savvy financiers, thought he was mad for even suggesting the idea. No one had ever attempted to ship ice long distances. How would he keep it from melting? And who would buy it-and why?

Frederic, however, had a vision as well as a business plan. He also suffered a personal loss that haunted him for years, a loss that likely helped spur his desire to create a nation of people utterly obsessed with ice-and eager to pay for it.

***

In February 1801, Frederic Tudor was just seventeen years old and had long been a thorn in his father’s side. William Sr. believed that success meant a respectable career in business or law, but Frederic had refused to go to college-not even to Harvard, where the judge’s business partners would have granted him admission. Instead, Frederic insisted on trying one moneymaking scheme after another, learning the ropes by experience-and mostly failure-rather than by the books. Exasperated, his father asked Frederic to join his brother, John Henry, who was suffering from bouts of weakness and a knee condition, on a months-long trip to Cuba. The trip, he figured, might force Frederic to stop his scheming and rethink his career path. Or so he hoped.

Frederic agreed-who would turn down an all-expense trip to the tropics?-and later that month, the brothers boarded a ship named Patty in Boston Harbor. They carried suitcases full of wool suits-the fashion of the day, even in warm temperatures-and nearly two hundred boiled eggs. The family chef had told them eggs would travel well. They did not.

As the ship departed, the brothers' minds were likely filled with dreams of sun-drenched Havana, an image that would have been in stark contrast to the cold, gray harbor stretched out before them. This had been an especially stormy winter in New England, and the sky roiled with ominous clouds. The ship set sail anyway, and within hours, a downpour flooded the deck, forcing the men to their cabins. The incessant rocking of the ship soured their stomachs. They spent the next several days sitting on their cots, bent at their waists, heaving into bedpans.

The ocean grew calmer once they reached southern waters. The sun came out, burning their noses and zapping the seawater collecting on the deck, turning it to steam. The brothers were at a loss for how to cope with the heat. Some of the crew suggested they avoid the sun by staying in their cabins, but without good ventilation, the tiny rooms were intolerably hot. The trip lasted four weeks.

When the Patty finally docked in Havana, the brothers death-marched onto shore with, as John Henry later wrote, "their tongues hanging out." Surrounding them were palm trees swaying in a light breeze. A cerulean blue ocean lapped at white sands. Paradise, it seemed, was everywhere they looked. Frederic hired an English-speaking servant named Francisco, who at first was something like a godsend: he introduced the men to pineapple juice and rum, fresh oranges, sweet guavas, and green figs. But when he noticed John Henry's poor health, Francisco (along with the woman who owned the house the brothers were staying in) restricted his diet to rice and water, an intervention that did nothing except annoy John Henry, who was determined to eat whatever he wanted, even if he had "to fight Francisco, kick the old woman & tell the doctor he's a quack." John Henry's knee grew worse.

Spring turned into summer, which brought even warmer weather, which in turn brought clouds of mosquitoes and armies of scorpions. The insect invasion was followed by a raging epidemic of yellow fever, a disease that ravaged the Caribbean and much of the American South every year. Doctors and scientists had yet to develop a vaccine for the disease, largely because they didn't understand that mosquitoes transmitted it through their stinging bites.

People throughout Havana fell ill with "the shakes"-a symptom of high fever that could last for days. When both Tudors caught this, they didn't know how to treat their aches and pains. Back home, they would have asked a servant to chisel chunks of ice from a block stored in the family icehouse so that they could press the cool substance to their hot foreheads. But warm places like Cuba didn't have icehouses, or even frozen water. The temperatures never dropped low enough, and a slap to the ocean's tepid surface would send a spray to the face that felt like sweat.

When other Americans left, so did the brothers. They purchased passage on a ship to Charleston, South Carolina, the first ship back to the United States they could get on short notice. Their luck didn't improve. The ship turned out to be carrying molasses in its cargo, which gave off a stench that oscillated between overripe fruit and rotting meat. Meanwhile, the heat was unbearable, and there was no way to get cool.

Eventually they made it to Philadelphia, where they parted ways. Frederic went back to Boston, and John Henry stayed behind. John Henry's health continued to fail, and in January 1802 he died with his mother by his bedside. His death shook Frederic to his core. For the next year, Frederic lived in alternating states of rage and regret. If only he had had access to ice in Cuba, he thought, perhaps his brother would have survived. Today we know that ice wouldn't have saved John Henry. He likely suffered from bone tuberculosis, a rare disease that requires specialized treatment developed only in the last one hundred years. But Frederic didn't know that. As far as he knew, John Henry died because he couldn't get cool.

Over the next several months, Frederic's behavior grew erratic. His family and friends avoided him, so he bought a diary to record his rants. Death and revenge on his mind, he drew a tombstone on the cover. Inside the drawing he wrote the...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593422198
ISBN 13 
9780593422199
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

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