True confession: I'm writing this under the influence of an absinthe snowball. It's appropriate, because I spent the morning with about 50 other people at Tales of the Cocktail thinking about a world before ice was available, before ice was transported from lakes to consumers, before drinks were cold, and waaaaay before anybody from Plum Street Snowballs fired up a snowball machine to shave ice (as they did on Thursday, July 18, at the Pharmacy Museum for a Pernod Absinthe event).
"Frozen Aristocracy: The History of Ice" was presented by Houston bartenders Bobby Heugel and Alba Huerta of Anvil Bar and Refuge. One of their upcoming projects is a place called Julep, and their search for the roots of the julep and other iconic Southern drinks led them down a slippery path into the history of ice and how it became a symbol of wealth and prestige.
Given the current ice obsessions of mixologists, who have fancy molds, perfect spheres and more, it was fascinating.
So why did the mint julep, with its mound of ice overtopping the chilled, flashy silver cup, become "the ultimate symbol of the aristocratic South,” as Heugel called it? For thousands of years, ice was a rare commodity reserved for the wealthy.
Their story of ice started in Egypt, with a slide showing an ancient method using clay vessels to create forst, which was harvested to make ice cream. In other cultures, ice was brought down from the Himalayas, and the Chinese made lanterns of carved ice blocks, a practice that spread to Russia.
“Ice was harvested in Europe in the 1600s, and it became a symbol of wealth,” Heugel said. Harvesting ice, with saws and other tools, was quite labor intensive.
About this time, servers came into the room with Sazerac samples in tasting cups. At room temperature. The way they would have been served in egg cups, as the story goes, at the dawn of the cocktail age.
“Can you imagine never drinking anything cold? We take ice for granted, but we’ve only been drinking beverages with ice for about 150 years. Ice water in restaurants is only about 100 years old,” Heugel said.
Much of their talk was devoted to Frederic Tudor, “the Ice King,” a 19th-century Bostonian who was passionate about bringing ice to the world. (He also was psychotic, they said.) From the 1820s, he was determined to harvest ice and ship it around the world. By and large, he succeeded, and he created a demand for it. Nathanial Wyatt invented a double-bladed ice plow, which created more uniform and longer-lasting blocks as the plow was drawn by horse across the ice.
By the time Tudor died in the 1860s, there were icehouses in major cities and the tropics. Tudor's ships, using ice as ballast, returned to the United States from Cuba with tropical fruits stored on remnants of the ice, increasing the availability of citrus for bartenders as well as the public.
Tudor’s passion for ice led to advances in public health, food preservation and, of course, bartending. Bartenders became his lower-level distributors. Like a drug dealer, he would give away ice to first-time customers. He always had ice with him, and would leave pitchers of ice water at various places. Although they were looked upon with suspicion, they did disappear.
“The Southern states became hooked on ice,” Heugel said. “They became his bread and butter, until the Civil War.”
Because it was a port city and had easier access to ice than many inland Southern cities, ice probably was one reason New Orleans became known for cocktails. New Orleans was less elitist than other cities, where drinking was “considered a low thing.”
By 1853, Tudor was shipping ice to Brazil, Chile, Peru, Australia and Europe — all places with a wealthy population, Huerta noted. During the Civil War, ice was the first thing prohibited by blockade.
With the Industrial Revolution came ice-making machines. The first successful one was in Florida, and by the 1880s they had spread through the South.
“But it was very expensive,” Heugel said. “And people thought it was the work of the devil. (So was drinking.)”
Some people wouldn’t buy machine-made ice because “good ice” came from lakes and could be identified by inclusions frozen in it. There was a funny essay by Henry David Thoreau, Heugel said, about Tudor harvesting ice from Walden Pond, where Thoreau bathed.
The invention and expansion of the railroad changed everything, and the first refrigerated cars took ice and cocktails, as well as produce and meat kept fresh on the ice, into the rest of the country.
“Suddenly, you don’t have to be a port city,” Heugel said. And recipes for cocktails started to change.
“Drinks became more juice-forward,” Heugel said. “Citrus was much more available.
"Ice kick-started the globalization of food.”