From the Vault: Of Ice and Men, with Fred Hogge

just as the book is a tremendous amount of fun. Hi, Fred, thanks for coming on the show.

but what survives. So when you're dealing with the ancient world, it's not just that people have the topics that they think are interesting and that they care about, but we also have to deal with this whole big problem of textual transmission, and a number of books, fast number of books just do not come down to us from the ancient world, and some of the ones that do come

down by very very strange ways. If I remember correctly, Katullus's poetry was found under a barrel in the fourteenth century and that was the only copy that came through somehow. And it's wonderful stuff. But when it comes to stuff like ice and functional things, it requires, on the one hand, an ancient writer to be interested, on the other hand for it to be so. For example, we know an enormous amount about aqueduct because a book by a guy

called front Tyness survives. If it hadn't, we would just have the archaeology. But as it is, we have the book and we know how they work with ice. I knew that the sources would be will be slim for the ancient stuff, and that's fair enough. And you spend a lot of time trawling around just trying to find a glimpse and mention as something here or there, But you know it's but that's part of the challenge, that's part of what makes it fun.

I've set out to try and do. And as soon as I started to delving into it, I realized what an extraordinary, rich seam of information it is, because it is that big sort of unsung hero and monster of modern life, and it's changing us. I think it's quite profound. I was reading what was it last week? I think that the eighth billion person has just been born on planet Earth. This is, in those small part down to

the extraordinary benefits that ice have brought. Humanity, both in terms of our nutrition, in terms of medicine, int of so many things, is absolutely supercharged the species. It's from nineteen forty five to now, the species has exploded, and it is entirely down to the fact that we are able to feed ourselves so much better because of refrigeration, because of cool chains, because of all of the benefits that ice has brought us, and what burden does that

place upon the rest of the system. And I think that's the big question.

struck with me. I first saw that film. Gosh, this dates me now. I saw that film on general release, so gosh, that was what eighty six. As you said, I think came out in eighty seven in the UK because we were often at that point a little bit behind the United States. But yes, I think that he has an absolute point. Ice has always been there from

the very beginning of civilization. The ancient Sumerians, the very first civilized society, had ice, which is something that is quite baffling to grasp, given as in the City of

a Rook. The first city is in the deserts of southern Iraq, and you know, were you to visit it today, you'd find this barren, wind swept, desolate landscape and it's very hard to imagine a that it was once a blossoming, fertile place and b that they could make ice there and it's baking, it's forty five degrees in the shade. But ice was there. Ice was inherent in their lives. We don't know how they use it. We just know that it was there, which is a Zever. Often one

of the big problems with archaeological sources. They'll tell you a thing, but they won't give you a context. But sorry, I'm rabbiting on I'm sorry.

and I still don't fully understand it. But when we look at those kind of cuneiform tablets from the ancient Middle and Near East, particularly as we get into the next section of where ice rears its head, and a kingdom called Mari, which was situated in eastern Syria around about like the fifteen fourteen hundreds PC, they mentioned an

ice house in their tablets. But when we get to that era, what we do have is an extraordinary level of correspondence written between the great kingdoms of the Middle and Near East, from the Hittites to the Assyrians, to the Mari to the Egyptians, and they're all broadly in Assyrium, and we have some of these archives. The one in Mari was discovered in the thirties. It is a huge insight into how that world operated and how it worked.

And these kings would sort of, you know, write to each other, you know, to the great King of Assyria, my brother, how how you doing, or that kind of thing. But again, the ice house in Mari is mentioned obliquely. We know that it was there. We don't know if there was only one or if there were many in their various different cities, but we know they had access to ice, and we know again it was a luxury item. It wasn't something that was there for everybody. It was a prestige product.

When you start looking at ancient Greece or civilizations like that, they have access to ice from mountain and they will bring the snow down. And we see this technology so in Italy and in Spain into the early modern era, and it doesn't really change a whole lot. You some poor bloke generally a bloke has to carry the snow down and a thing on his back. You pack it down hard into the ground into a pit that's insulated with branches and then covered and then sold. And you

could do this. You can do this in the Lebanon because you can get the the ice from the mountains at at the top of the Becker Valley. You can do it in Greece. You can do it in Italy, the Appennines was the big source of ice from Rome. You can do it in Sudden Spain as host it is in Seville. You still have mountains quite close by where you should where you can get the ice from. But if you don't have that access, it's not going

to happen. And India is quite an interesting one because because because again they were able to do an evaporative cooling technique with special ponds, and as the cooler would come off the mountains, you could place clay pots out and the walls would freeze and they would have ice for the next day. But again, this is a short lived resource. It's not going to to be around for very long, and therefore is the preserve of the wealthy for really up until the nineteenth century.

I mean, Seneca's plays are mental. And Shakespeare was a very big fan of Seneca's playwriting, which might explain explain all the clart and gore and Coriolanus, but he was, Yeah, Seneca. Shakespeare was a big fan of Seneca's dramaturgy. Uh, he's he does, he does like to you know him, you know juvenile as well. There are a bunch of those guys around that first century who do like to have quite snotty opinions about how awful the modern world is,

which I suppose is something that hasn't really changed. But yes, he was not a fan of ice. He thought ice was bad people and that they shouldn't be doing it, which is an idea that would prevail for quite a long time, for at least another sort of five six hundred years after his time. There's a Spanish doctor Minardist who's I think I mentioned the book, who writes about

how bad ice can be for you. There's an enormous amount of ink and paper wasted on medical literature saying that ice is a bad thing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

New England. And these are blocks of solid ice, and solid ice is very much more pure than compacted snow, and they were shipping this all around the world from Tudor started in eighteen oh six and finally really got it figured out in the eighteen twenties after the War of eighteen twelve. Was you know, that kind of put the kaibosh on him for a while. But as the demand increases, you have two problems. The first is you

want to make more ice faster for your stores. So they would do this thing which is called sinking the well, whereby having cut a bunch of ice out, they would also drill extra holes in the top of a pond or lake so that the water would well up and refreeze. But what that would do would it would capture your footprints between the original layer that you were walking on and the water that welled up, so there would be dirt trapped within the ice, which was not exactly pleasing

to the customer. But the bigger problem, as you point out, as time goes on is pollution, and the uptake of ice usage runs parallel alongside with the industrial revolution and the various pourings of industrial waste human waste into the waterways which were then being harvested for ice, and one of the most awful cases. There was a mental hospital in upstate New York that used to cut its ice from the river downstream of where their effluent pipe ran

in and a number of people died. And this is kind of the beginning of the end for natural ice as a commercial proposition.

the European context doesn't happen until the seventeenth century. There's a lovely sort of piece of mythology that Catherine de Medici, when she was married to the Dauphin of France, brought the recipe and all kinds of other recipes with her into France and transformed French cooking. But this is absolutely rot. For one reason, she was thirteen fourteen and probably not wildly interested in recipes at the time and would have

been stripped of all things Italian at the border. For another, the science of how do you make cream freeze was not known in Europe at that point, although it was known in other parts of the world, and it crops up. There's a twelfth century Indian Treaties which describes how to do it, and it basically involves making a brine solution within which to freeze your cream. The thing is cream freezes about half a degree lower than water, so even if you just put it in ice, you're just going

to end up with cold cream. So you've got to find a way to make the chilling snow even colder, and the best way to do that is to add a shed load of salt to it. Brine freezes at are much lower temperature, so you can get the surrounding liquid down to about minus sixteen celsius and then you have a chance of churning your cream into ice cream. And Europeans did not figure this out for quite a long time. I think part of the reason being that

salt was so expensive. This is one of the things that is quite hard for us to grasp today because you know, you go into the store and you can buy a packet of kosher salt for less than a dollar. The idea of salt being a prestige and expensive commodity is something that battles us now. But it was, and it was highly taxed as well. It was very highly taxed, and so as good as ice cream tastes, even if you know the science, you're not going to waste the salt on it. If that makes sense.

We know again with Saladein there's the fantastic story of him killing a guy called Raymond de Chatillon because Raymond took a glass of iced rose water out of Saladein's hand and drank it when it wasn't given to him, and Saladin kills him stone dead, which is a scene that crops up in Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, which

interesting movie. Original release cut, not very good, the director's cut, which has an extra forty five minutes of stuff, and it is actually quite the movie, and that scene is very powerful. So we know the ice is very present, and we know that people argue about whether it's good for people or not. You always have your senecan kind of people cropping up saying oh, you know, the party

poopers saying no, we shouldn't have any ice. But it's there, is there is current, it's present, and it's as I said, before is the preserve of the wealthy. As to whether there's a shift or not of acceptance, I don't think he never wasn't accepted. I just think that there were your dissenters in literature who happen to be writing about it, and their books survive. With a product like ice. The fans aren't gonna buy they're writing, the dissenters will because

that sells. And twas ever, thus even you know, before the invention of the printing press. So the people who are who are writing and dissenting are are I think, I think in the minority. I can't prove that because there's just not enough information upon which to make a judgment. But that's my hunch.

And you know, I've done my time in Bars. I worked in Bars when I was a student to pay my way through college and all the rest of it. So I've had Jerry Thomas on my shelf for a long time because I've had the book for so long, I suppose this kind of blew my mind. It was like, what, wait, Jerry, where's the ice? What the hell is going on? Man? I just you know, I couldn't quite get my head

around it. Eighteen sixty two, he writes that Frederick Tudor starts trading his eyes out to Boston in eighteen o six. That gap of time, what's that fifty four years? Fifty six years? My mass is atrocious. Please forgive me. Ice has become every day it's become an ordinary, unremarkable thing. And this to me blows my actual mind.

manages the the first few years. The War of eighteen twelve starts in of course, as its name suggests, eighteen twelve, the seas are closed. The seas were closed earlier than that, in eighteen oh seven, because the Americans didn't want to have their seamen captured by the British impressed into the British Navy who were fighting the French at that time. So there was a whole thing going on with that

which made it quite tricky for him. He gets into terrible, terrible, terrible debt to the extent that he's sent to prison for it, and his father manages to get some people together and have a whip bround and they bail him out, and he gets back into business and he starts I think it's Charleston first, and then Savannah in the South, he starts shipping ice. And he also he doesn't just

ship ice to these places. He also invents ice bots for our domestic use, which would put a lump of ice on the top and you can keep your milky cheese, your fish or whatever nice and cool. But his real innovation is that he realizes that the gateway to the

ice business is drinks an ice cream. So whenever he arrives in a place, when he arrives in Savannah, when he arrives in Charleston in nineteen twenty four, when he arrives in New Orleans, he gives the ice away to bartenders for at least the first sort of period of time. Because his theory is he writes one of his letters to a guy called Stephen Cabot, who is managing one of his ice operations in the Caribbean, is that I'm going to paraphrase, I'm not going to quite quote this accurately.

He says, if a man has had his drink cold for one week, he will not go back to having it warm. And he's not wrong, particularly in those kind of climates. And so you know, that's when the sort of the ice cube gets into the old fashioned I think is that is around that very era. I mean, you know, nineteen twenty four he gets to New Orleans. That's to me the birth of the cocktail right there.

He was brilliant. He was shipping to India by eighteen thirty three, he was shipping to Australia by eighteen thirty five. This is all hand carved ice from lakes in New England going around the world. And it's one of those brilliantly battling moments of history that's completely forgotten because we don't need it anymore. But you know, there's this one brilliant thing I think I reference reference it in the book. I think about eighteen thirty seven, the ice supply dries

up in Calcutta, when the place goes nuts. All these people are just going, you know, where is it? Their editorials written in the newspaper saying, where has our ice gone? How can we function like this, you know, and it's kind of brilliant. So yes, because of Tudor's brilliance and his determination to come into a place, bring a load of ice, snack it up and sell it cheap and turn it from being this luxury commodity for the wealthy into an everyday necessity. And I think this is the

big thing. Is he makes it quittidian, he makes it ordinary.

He makes it something you cannot function without. That's why Jerry Thomas is able to just say ice should be washed and set aside, because to him is it is now ordinary, and even as it is transforming his customer's experience, even it is in eighteen sixty two beginning to form the basis of the very first cool chains in the United States, with big, massive locks of ice being strung in hammocks in train cabins, over meat and vegetables, it

is now an everyday thing. And that's exactly the kind of stuff that people don't write about, and it's exactly why it's fascinating.

I'm going to try the depth nonstropistai. He records a story of the comic play right, diphilis going around for dinner with this woman called good Natheia, and she has snow that's been sent by one of her lovers, brought in to chill the wine. So that's you know, nearly you know, two thy five hundred years ago. I think that humans have always liked a cold, refreshing drink. I think that it's just part of who we are. It's just that we haven't had access to it for the

vast bulk of our history. And with wine in particular. We know the Tuscans were very keen on chilling their white wines down in the middle part Lost millennium. We can attest to that. And God knows, those lovely flinty whites that they make are beautiful and nicely iced and cold, so they clearly knew what they were doing.

They had a vast library. They were incredibly ahead of the curve in terms of their awareness of the need to take care of the men's mental health should they be frozen in and this is one of the things they absolutely got right. The real problem for them is their cold weather clothes were largely made of wool, which is in fact the most terrible insulator if you're in an Arctic environment, because you know you do the work

needs to be done, you sweat into the wool. Then you stop working, you start getting cold, and the sweat in the wolf freezes and this is a problem, and nobody thought to ask the locals, apart weirdly from the guy who was the first person to report back news of what happened to the Franklin expedition, and explorer called John Ray, who was a Scottish guy. He was a surveyor, he was a surgeon. He's probably the only Arctic explorer of the era from the UK who never got a

knight head. And he was the one guy who learned how to speak to the Inuit and learned how to move like the Inuit, dressed like the Inuit, survive hunt exist in that fashion, and he is largely unique amongst

those nineteenth century polar explorers. And he was the one guy who got the first, the first stories, the first Inuit testimony of what happened to the men of the Franklin expedition, as tragic as it was, and was rubbished for his efforts by no lesser author than the ghastly Charles Dickens, who, really, you know, was I can't talk. I need to stop talking about Dickens. I can't stand the man. He's been the bane of my life since school.

I can't read his stuff. He's a racist bastard. I can't stand him.

noble naval officers, rather than the meeting themselves. And he couldn't He couldn't countenance the idea that a oral society could know something and tell us something that might be useful to him. That was preposterous because they couldn't write anything down. Therefore, they're absolutely useless, in his opinion, and he writes this stuff down, and you know, we tend to remember his novels, which I find verbose and quite dull,

but generally speaking quite open hearted. His journalism not so much. His journalism betrays the full on Victorian that he and he can be both things at once. I mean, you know, yes, and I was, weirdly, I was talking to a friend on the phone earlier on the Only bit of Dickens that I actually like is the David Lean film Great Expectations, which I think is a tremendous movie and a brilliant

bit of storytelling. But one of the main reasons why it's a brilliant bit of storytelling he doesn't have all that bloody verbiage in it, and Lean is brilliant at his image selection and everything else. It's a fantastic and very disturbing movie. But Dickens and me, we're not friends.

That was really interesting because it never occurred to me I'm in part I mean, I'm godly I'm fifty now and so when when I was a kid, ski coverage was just beginning to happen on British television. We had this show called magazine show called Ski Sunday, and it would cover all the big races in Europe and it was tremendously exciting and we were gripped. We only had three channels, so we didn't have a great deal of choice,

but it was fantastic stuff. The medical chapter as well, was was was eye opening, particularly Samuel Tillischman's Tisherman's Sorry, his work on trying to freeze down the body of a trauma patient as quickly as possible to try and stop the brain damage before you can stop the bleeding. The biggest problem that you have should you be shot or stabbed is bleeding out and the organ failure that

then follows. And what he's trying to do, and he's just going into the second phase of clinical trials right now, is to work out a way that you get the patient into the emergency room and you chill them right down as fast as you can to protect the brain and to protect the heart, so you can then get in and you have time to deal with whatever the traumatic issue is that is causing the blood loss. And

this is absolutely cutting edge stuff. And when I started writing that chapter, I had no idea that mister Tischerman existed.

Doctor Tischman. That absolutely blows my mind. It's extraordinary. I stumbled into that chapter because I saw a documentary back in the nineties about using hypothermia in open heart surgery and how it hadn't quite worked out, but it was the history of the early state of open heart surgery and how chilling the patient and using hypothermia was really the best way to stop the heart jumping about before somebody invents the bypass machine, and so I was fascinated

by the idea of how you can use hypothermia in a therapeutical setting. Nothing prepared me for what doctor Tishman is up to, and it is the most astounding stuff and if it works, it's going to genuinely transform trauma medicine.

I think everyone out there will enjoy the book.

and I didn't even think about the connection. Thanks as always to Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show. And if you would like to reach out to me or to Joe, any of us here at the show, you can shoot us an email at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.