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The Grouch - March 06

OPEN THE fridge and just take out what you want.  Be it winter or summer, the cold drinks or ice cream are stored there for your convenience.  Fresh meat and fish also keep well and if you reduce the temperature to freezing or just below, they will stay safe to eat for months on end.  What a brilliant invention!  How on earth did we manage before refrigeration was available at the flick of a switch?

Wandering by Taymouth Castle the other day, just out of curiosity to see how the conversion and building work was coming along, I stumbled on the old Ice House which had served the castle and its privileged occupants, long before electricity and refrigeration were even dreamt of.  The circular and partly buried stone building has only just been rediscovered by bulldozers.  Now we wonder if it will be restored and maintained as a feature of by-gone days.  But, that’s another story.

This story begins way back in time.  The ancient Egyptians were known to have shipped ice from the Adriatic and the Greek and Roman upper classes used ice to preserve food.  Marco Polo almost certainly took back a recipe for ice cream from his travels in China but the widespread use of stored ice only began in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe.  By the early 1600s storehouses were being built by English landowners who imported the idea from the Italians and French.  The vogue spread to Scotland a little later.

In ‘The Times’ of September 1957 there was a report of an ice-house found on a bomb site by St James’s Palace, London.  This house was mentioned as being built in 1670 and, from the pictures taken before the site was redeveloped, it appears that the ice-house design was very like that found at Castle Huntly in Perthshire.  The well preserved egg-shaped chamber is sunk 13 feet into a hillside and the double-cavity walled brickwork is perfectly dry – after 300 years.

Commercial use of ice came a little later.  As large scale fishing developed along the East coast of Scotland during the 18th century, ice houses became very necessary and every cove and village around the coast had a pit or stone house built into the ground and placed near a pond or dam.  When winter ice formed on the ponds, men with large serrated blades would cut it up and shovel it into carts to be tipped down into the subterranean pits.  Sometimes saltpetre was added and it would be sprinkled with water.  Often bracken or straw layers were added every foot or so and the secret was to exclude as much air as possible.

These old ice stores were remarkably efficient, simply because the temperature of melting ice remains at freezing point until it is all completely melted.  Properly packed, an ice house could keep sides of meat and seasonal foods fresh throughout the hottest summer.  The last commercial ice house in Aberdeen stood, appropriately enough, in Fish Street until the mid 1960s.  The big, arch-roofed building was covered with turf and, as a fishing industry relic, was well worth preserving.  However, along with the street that it stood in, it was sacrificed in the name of progress and to serve the needs of the oil industry in its frantic developmental phase.

The development of refrigeration technology changed the face of civilisation and a Scot had a hand in the process.  It was William Cullen, at Glasgow University in 1748, who first demonstrated that volatile liquids absorb heat when they evaporate.  He never advanced his work beyond the laboratory and it was 100 years later before the first practical ice-making machines were perfected.

By the 1870s ice manufacture was commonplace, particularly in North America, but in the beginning lots of people resisted it, considering it ‘unhealthy’.  Now, more than one billion gallons of ice cream is consumed in the US alone each year, and that is just the ‘recreational’ side to the vast worldwide food industry which depends on man-made ice and refrigeration.

Now, watch this space for further news about developments in and around Taymouth Castle.  Meanwhile I might just be applying for the franchise to make and sell “The Original Taymouth Castle Ice Cream” (as enjoyed by the Dukes of Breadalbane in the 18th century and which, by the way, uses no electricity to make!).  At around £5 a tub it could be a snip and the Americans would love it!  Now, all I need is a cold winter.

by Alex Peak

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