Vanity fair illuminations brief8/19/2023 ![]() ![]() We can get that kind at a fast food restaurant, or with a bigger buy-in, on our counters at home. We can have it crunchy, or rather, in a laminated ice that goes by the name pellet, pebble, or nugget, depending on what you heard first. We can have it the old-fashioned way, harvested from lakes and distributed in blocks, if we live in the right part of the country and are feeling a bit nostalgic. We can have it crushed, chipped, shaved, or molded into cylinders with the center hollowed out. We can have ice frozen into cubes, spheres, or tiny little hearts. Natural ice fought back, claiming for a brief moment that it had the good, fancy, luxurious ice because it was “natural.” Now, cocktail ice is the thing, specially made for clarity and size.Įach of these subsequent ice eras have led, in their own winding ways, to this golden age of ice. Proponents of the ice machine, invented at the turn of the last century, sold man-made ice as the purest, most luxurious version of the thing it was made from distilled water, they argued, and not potentially sewage-y river water riddled with the manure of the horses employed to harvest it. As Brady writes, when a man from a wealthy Boston family named Frederic Tudor decided in the early 1800s to bring ice from up north to the warmest climes, from Martinique to Cuba to New Orleans, he marketed it as a luxury while teaching his customers what it was and how to use it. Ice, Brady told me, has been sold as a luxury product “every time there’s a disruption in the ice trade or a new way of thinking about ice” it’s a story as American as apple pie (a phrase that has its roots in the ice trade, I learned from Brady’s book). Over 300 or so pages of her book, Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks, a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, published this month, Brady thoroughly answers the question, how did we get to this place of total ice abundance in America? This is, of course, a relatively recent development in the whole scheme of human civilization, but like all such luxuries (the internet, air travel, constitutional democracy), one that the species tended to take for granted about five minutes after its introduction. She knew it as anyone knows that if they are so blessed to wake up tomorrow morning, they’ll be breathing air. ![]() Brady realized she had a faith so strong that it was a fact: She could walk into almost any other convenience store (or home) in America and there would be ice there too. ![]() During that summer’s brutal heat wave, the journalist and historian drove to a convenience store in the midwest to get a cup of ice, implicitly knowing that she could. Amy Brady noticed something so normal it was strange. ![]()
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