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Now in paperback, the fascinating story of America's vast natural ice trade which revolutionized the 19th century. On February 13, 1806, the brig Favorite left Boston harbor bound for the Caribbean island of Martinique with a cargo that few imagined would survive the month-long voyage. Packed in hay in the hold were large chunks of ice cut from a frozen Massachusetts lake. This was the first venture of a young Boston entrepreneur, Frederic Tudor, who believed he could make a fortune selling ice to people in the tropics. Ridiculed at the outset, Tudor endured years of hardship before he was to fulfill his dream. Over the years, he and his rivals extended the frozen-water trade to Havana, Charleston, New Orleans, London, and finally to Calcutta, where in 1833 more than one hundred tons of ice survived a four-month journey of 16,000 miles with two crossings of the equator. The Frozen-Water Trade is a fascinating account of the birth of an industry that ultimately revolutionized domestic life for millions of people.
Fall is a time to celebrate food. Farmers and gardeners work hard to grow crops all spring and summer. In fall, we harvest pumpkins, pecans, corn, potatoes, and more. Mmm!
A historical study of how increased access to ice—decades before refrigeration—transformed American life. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans depended upon ice to stay cool and to keep their perishable foods fresh. Jonathan Rees tells the fascinating story of how people got ice before mechanical refrigeration came to the household. Drawing on newspapers, trade journals, and household advice books, Before the Refrigerator explains how Americans built a complex system to harvest, store, and transport ice to everyone who wanted it, even the very poor. Rees traces the evolution of the natural ice industry from its mechanization in the 1880s through its gradual collapse, which started after World War I. Meatpackers began experimenting with ice refrigeration to ship their products as early as the 1860s. Starting around 1890, large, bulky ice machines the size of small houses appeared on the scene, becoming an important source for the American ice supply. As ice machines shrunk, more people had access to better ice for a wide variety of purposes. By the early twentieth century, Rees writes, ice had become an essential tool for preserving perishable foods of all kinds, transforming what most people ate and drank every day. Reviewing all the inventions that made the ice industry possible and the way they worked together to prevent ice from melting, Rees demonstrates how technological systems can operate without a central controlling force. Before the Refrigerator is ideal for history of technology classes, food studies classes, or anyone interested in what daily life in the United States was like between 1880 and 1930. “An in-depth portrayal of a once-indispensable, life-changing technology, the former existence of which is as unknown to most of us as that of the telegraph or canal is to today’s undergraduates. . . . Rees synthesizes considerable archival research and presents interpretations of importance to scholars. . . . Before the Refrigerator is as refreshing as ice water on a hot summer day.” —Journal of American History “This fact-filled book explains how ice became an American necessity by the early twentieth century. Students in business history and history of technology courses will be fascinated to learn how macrobreweries made lager into America’s favorite beer, how cocktails became commonplace, and how burly men used to lug giant blocks of ice into American kitchens.” —Shane Hamilton, author of Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy
An interdisciplinary and quantitative account of human claims on the biosphere's stores of living matter, from prehistoric hunting to modern energy production. The biosphere—the Earth's thin layer of life—dates from nearly four billion years ago, when the first simple organisms appeared. Many species have exerted enormous influence on the biosphere's character and productivity, but none has transformed the Earth in so many ways and on such a scale as Homo sapiens. In Harvesting the Biosphere, Vaclav Smil offers an interdisciplinary and quantitative account of human claims on the biosphere's stores of living matter, from prehistory to the present day. Smil examines all harvests—from prehistoric man's hunting of megafauna to modern crop production—and all uses of harvested biomass, including energy, food, and raw materials. Without harvesting of the biomass, Smil points out, there would be no story of human evolution and advancing civilization; but at the same time, the increasing extent and intensity of present-day biomass harvests are changing the very foundations of civilization's well-being. In his detailed and comprehensive account, Smil presents the best possible quantifications of past and current global losses in order to assess the evolution and extent of biomass harvests. Drawing on the latest work in disciplines ranging from anthropology to environmental science, Smil offers a valuable long-term, planet-wide perspective on human-caused environmental change.
'A splendid tale of human ingenuity in the service of taste, sedulously researched and told with great flair.' Loyd Grossman Sunday Times Author of such cookery classics as Italian Food and French Provincial Cooking, Elizabeth David (1913-1992) found that the literature of cookery, as well as the practical side, was of absorbing interest, and she studied it throughout her life. Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen was published in 1970, followed by English Bread and Yeast Cookery, for which she won the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year award, in 1977. At the time of her death in 1992 she was working on this equally epic study of the use of ice, the ice-trade and the early days of refrigeration, which was published posthumously in 1994 as Harvest of the Cold Months. 'An awe-inspiring feat of detective scholarship, the literally marvellous story of how human beings came to ingest lumps of flavoured frozen matter for pleasure ... There is much, much more - about the making and breaking of reputations, the founding of Parisian café culture, the great and rivalrous confectioners of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London, about Russian ice-cream (surprisingly superior) and Persian sherbets ... sumptuous.' Independent on Sunday 'This survey of the use of ice in cookery takes us on a fascinating journey from 1581, where in Florence they put snow in the wine glasses, to that modern phenomenon, the growth of the ice-cream business. A scholarly social history, which makes a fitting finale to the work of the greatest of our writers on foods and its contexts.' Harpers & Queen
The mutual history of art, agriculture, and American identity as told through the theme of the harvest. The harvest has traditionally been a productive season, both on American farms and in its artists’ studios. Before the early nineteenth century, the ideal of the Jeffersonian yeoman, singly cultivating a subsistence plot for family use, dominated the American imagination; after World War II, the advent of big agribusiness proved less immediately attractive for artists. In We Gather Together, Charles C. Eldredge examines the period in between—when many Americans were farmers and much of America was farmland. Organized in a series of case studies each devoted to a single crop, We Gather Together initially focuses on familiar commodity crops such as corn, wheat, and potatoes, and then expands to other yields by Native American harvesters and California floriculturists, as well as winter ice cutters and coastal seaweed gatherers. This novel history of agriculture and art traces parallel developments on land and canvas, highlighting breakthroughs in each field. Artists such as Winslow Homer, Doris Lee, and Georgia O’Keeffe are joined by innovators in agriculture, whether mechanical inventors such as Eli Whitney, John Deere, and Cyrus McCormick or genetic hybridizers such as Luther Burbank, W. Atlee Burpee, and Theodosia Shepherd. Surveying an astonishing amount of material and a wide range of paintings, prints, and other artworks from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, We Gather Together gorgeously demonstrates how the use of agricultural metaphors permeated American visual culture. The harvest, we see here, came to signify and dominate politics, poetry, and popular culture, ultimately representing a primary facet of American identity and nationhood.