From Hunter To Herdsman

Man changed from a hunter to a herdsman and a farmer. Families developed into clans, clans into tribes, tribes into cities and sometimes into nations. But man continued to use the coolest parts of cave and underground chambers as storage places for preserving his food. Ice came and went. Man used it when he could, but never dreamed of making it artificially. The Egyptians encouraged the formation of natural ice on cool nights by filling shallow clay pans with water. Row after row of these pans were laid out, in plots covering as much as four acres. By morning thin layers of ice could be harvested. During his campaign in India, Alexander the Great had his wine cooled in great trenches filled with snow and covered with branches. The Romans developed a method of using cold water and saltpeter to cool their wine, and, like the Greeks, they also stored snow in deep underground pits.

Nero, whose name is more often linked with fire, is said to have established icehouses in Rome. Roman emperors also were wealthy and powerful enough to have gangs of slaves bring fresh snow and ice from distant mountains every day. By this means, chilled food and drink could be served at royal banquets. The Inca and Aztec rulers of the New World also are said to have used this type of refrigeration. Then the Roman Empire fell, the system of refrigeration by slave power fell also, and later rulers went back to cooling their food in caves or in underground snow pits. But this was not always successful, and people often had to be content with food that was partially spoiled. To disguise this, cooks used all the spices they could, literally burying the rotten taste under a barrage of flavoring.

If the world had known more about refrigeration, the craving for spices would not have gripped Europe, and Columbus might never have set out to find a new route to India and the Spice Islands. There are a few other references to ice and refrigeration in history that might be mentioned. One story tells how Saladin sent a frozen sherbet, made with snow from the eastern mountains, to Richard the Lion-hearted when that famous Crusader was ill with a fever. Two centuries later Marco Polo, that celebrated Italian traveler, brought back from China recipes for making water and milk ices. Another three centuries later Francis Bacon, one of the Elizabethan immortals, caught the chill that caused his death while stuffing a fowl with snow in order to see whether the cold would preserve it. One of his last questions was about his experiment.

By: davidbunch

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