Eat My Globe

Interview with Cool Historian & Filmmaker,

Fred Hogge

INTRO MUSIC

SIMON MAJUMDAR (“SM”):

Hi everybody, this is Simon Majumdar, your creator and host of Eat My Globe, a podcast that tells you all the things you didn't know you didn't know about food.

And on today's very special episode, we have a guest who's gonna tell us all about his new publication, “Of Ice and Men: How We’ve Used Cold to Transform Humanity.” A History. Fred Hogge is a filmmaker and writer, whereas before he has contributed to many features on cocktail making to how to work the Wing Tsun has been used in modern business. Today, he is looking at the role ice played in many areas of humanity. But for our purposes, particularly about food. It's a truly extraordinary story featuring so many ranges of people from kings to presidents, from kitchen workers, to housewives, from cocktail makers, as I mentioned before, to one of my favorites, Frederic “the Ice King” Tudor. As you can tell, ice is a subject that is a particular interest to me, and I know from your emails, to you too. So, it gives me the greatest pleasure to introduce the author of, “Of Ice and Men,” Fred Hogge.

Fred, how are you?

FRED HOGGE (“FH”):

I'm very well, thanks, Simon. How are you?

SM:

I am incredibly well. I'm very, very happy. I will tell you to be talking to someone about ice, which sounds like an odd move, but it is so, important in food, uh, particularly, uh, that I think having someone like you coming on and, and giving us, let's say, your expertise of, uh, ice and, and men all the way through, I think is really, really important. So, before we do anything else, um, before we go on to talk about the subject of ice, uh, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about yourself and why you find yourself writing about this fascinating subject.

FH:

Well, I kind of stumbled onto this subject, to be honest with you. I mean, um, I, like you said, I've been in the movie world for most of my career and then branched out into, uh, writing books for other people, ghosting and, um, that kind of stuff. And with this topic in particular, um, I was helping out my wife, Kay, uh, who was teaching a class in London at a cookery school called, Divertimenti, and it had a cocktail. So, she asked me in to come and make the cocktails. Um, and I happened to mention that sort of the student that, um, you really can't have a cocktail without ice. Um, it's kind of the integral ingredients. And one of the students said, “Really? Prove it.”

[Laughter]

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

And so, I thought, Okay. Um, and it took me a while, but I think we've got there.

[Laughter]

SM:

Well, I think you have, I, I have to say, and, and as I uh, mentioned, uh, before we got online, it's the first time I've seen a, a full book about refrigeration and ice the whole way through. And, and it's one of those things that I think with, um, people in food, particularly, it's absolutely vital. So, what I'd like to do is let's talk about, you know, the, the history of food and the history of ice and its impact on food. Um, and I'm gonna start way, way back when in the neolithic and the kind of ancient periods of humanity for you. Um, because back then there, you know, people were more nomadic, I think, I think is than they were now, except for a few decreasing numbers of people. Uh, and I think they became aware of the notion of ice, but did we see any kind of archeological ways of them using ice or, or was this just kind of, they knew it when it was there if they happened to be in a place where there was ice?

FH:

Well, this is, this is a really interesting question, and it's a really hard one to, to answer, uh, because when you're talking about pre-settled societies, like in, in Neolithic pre, um, urbanization, pre-civilization, if you will, there just really isn't the evidence. Um, and, and that's always quite problematic. Um, what you, what the evidence do we have is basically things, objects, and it's really hard to, to read a lot into them and, and to work out what, what they're actually telling you. You have the that of them, um, they're there, you can hold them, you can look at them, um, but you don't have the context. You don't have a way of placing them within how that society worked, which is what writing ultimately gives you when people do start writing things down. And there's that brilliant bit in Stephen King's book on writing where, he basically says, writing is an act of telepathy. You describe a thing, and his example in the book is a bird cage on the table. And no matter how much detail you add into this description, um, you've implanted an image into the reader's mind and they will fill in the rest. They will decide what that table looks like. They'll decide whether it's a big or a small bird cage. They may even, you know, put the bird into it. So, that, that, that, that's part of our problem. I used to get in trouble when I was at university because I used to find the whole thing of hand acts dating in sort of the British prehistory. It's problematic. I was like, one piece of thing looks like another piece of thing, um, which didn't get me a very good mark on that paper. Um, so, so, it's very, very hard to tell. And then when you, you do start getting writing after the birth of, of civilization, um, in, in our modern-day Iraq, um, our sources are, are, are very, very limited. Um, and, and the other problem we have with them, with those sources is that we are not the intended reader of those things. We're culturally adrift when we look at them. We don't, again, we, we lack that context. It's, it's that L.P. Hartley quote, you know, the past is a foreign country.

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

Um, and, and, and so, these sources, when writing starts, they're not for us. Um, and, but they are still their part of our cultural inheritance. Um, and so, the opinions and the thoughts that they have and all the rest of it, somehow those ideas do come down to us as part of a, a long legacy of cultural inheritance. Um, but the problem is when we're dealing with the, the, the prehistoric era and we're looking at things, we don't know necessarily what we're inheriting. We just have the objects and the archeology, and we have to try and interpret that as best we can. So, we just simply, until people write about it, we have no evidence for whether or how people used ice. Um, which is very frustrating,

SM:

Which is and. . . . Well, let's, let's scoop over that one because I, but I think it's interesting just to look at, and, and maybe even, even though as a historian, we shouldn't kind of do, uh, what ifs, but, uh, but, uh, I think, yeah, I would like to, I would like to believe that they did use ice even if they were just in ice or in [inaudible].

But let's go on then, cuz you, you did mention we got into the, you know, kind of into the Age of Civilization, um, as we begin to see our first ice houses mentioned. Um, and, and I'm gonna try and get this right. This was the year 13 of the Age of Shulgi, King of all Sumer and Akkad, Builder of the Great Ziggurat of Ur, to be exact.

FH:

Yeah. Right.

SM:

And, um, so, that was the first time I think an ice house was mentioned. I think I even wrote about it when I wrote about refrigeration. Um, but is it, I mean, again, I guess this is an op. . ., uh, thing for you to use there, but I mean, do you think it was the first ice house? Or did, did he come from, you know, mention it from just. . . he came up with it?

FH:

I, I, I think it probably was the first ice house, um. . . .

SM:

Right.

FH:

And the fact that they wrote it down means it's a big deal. Um, there's a, a wonderful quotation from George Harrison in the Beatles anthology documentary where he says, and, and I'm paraphrasing slightly, um, just because he happened to shoot some eight-millimeter or 60-millimeter film or something, it goes in the show, uh, but if you hadn't shot it, would it matter? Would anybody remember? Um, and it kind of sums up the nature of ancient so. . . sources. If we have it, it matters, if we don't, we just have to wonder about what, what we are missing. Um, and, you know, we, we have no archeological, uh, remains of Shulgi’s ice house.

SM:

Yes.

FH:

Um, but, but as, as I, which he built in the 13th year of his reign, as you said, which was around 2081 BCE. Um, and we have to assume it's a pretty big deal because it's written down on the list, um, and, and, and it exists. Um, did they build more ice houses? Probably. Uh, was it a fresh luxury or did they have the means to make ice broadly available to their people? We just don't know. Um, did they share this technology? Again, we, we don't know. I mean, we have to make, we. . . wait many hundreds of years before we get the next reference. Um, but it's, it gets frustrating, but we know that it mattered.

SM:

I, I, I mean, I think that's how I came about it as well, because I kind of thought, yes, it's been, you know, mentioned in a history book or in a, in a scroll or whatever. I can't remember, was it in. . .

FH:

This case, a clay tablet.

SM:

A clay tablet. And, uh, I thought the fact that it had been mentioned meant that it had been important. But where I come to it, really when I was studying it was, uh, you know, um, we see a similar building, I think similar-ish anyway, being built by the dynasty of the Lims. Um, this is a, I think a Bronze Age civilization, uh, somewhere between Babylon and Aleppo or something. Zimri mentioned, mentioned. . . . Sorry?

FH:

It's on the Euphrates near Deir ez-Zor, uh, was where Mari civilization was situated.

SM:

Which is, which is, uh, fantastic to know. And Zimri-Lim mentions these ice houses were probably 200 years later. Um, so, how similar to these were what had already been built and how similar them, were them to the ones that the Yakchals used, uh, much later?

FH:

Um, again, a, a, a very, very good question to which the answer is again, we, we don't know. Um, we have no information about the design of the ice houses used either by Zimri-Lim or by Shugi, 200 something years earlier. Um, what is interesting though is that Shulgi was married to a princess of Ma. . . Mari, a woman named Nin-kalla.

SM:

Oh.

FH:

And daughter of, of the Mari King. . .

[Chime Sound]

. . . Apil-Kin.

Oh, I'm sorry about that.

SM:

That's okay.

FH:

Um, and if Apil-Kin operated like Zimri-Lim so, many years later, then he's marrying off his daughters to create alliances. Um, and then using their correspondence with him to understand what's going on, where they, where they, they now live, and a kind of familial intelligence gathering network. And Zimri-Lim was very, very good at this. And we have a vast archive of his letters. So, so, it's entirely possible, but entirely unprovable that Sumerian ice tech might have made its way back to Mari via her. And it's equally unprovable that it might have come with her from Mari. They, they may have been similar, um, even though the two mentions of ice houses in this period are so, many, many years apart, uh, there's no evidence to support it, but they are, um, it's one of those tantalizing pieces of information. Um, but again, it's one of our key problems with, with, with sources for the ancient world. Um, and in this case, we're talking proto history. We have, uh, we don't have any books. We don't have any people writing histories. We do have these correspondences from, uh, the Bronze Age, which is clearly a very interesting diplomatic community with great kings writing letters back and forth to each other, um, be it from the Egyptians to Mari to Babylon to the Hittite Empire in Turkey. Um, a flurry of, of, of interesting information that helps us to understand these worlds. But, but as, as, as you look at the ancient world, it's, it, it's what survives. Um, and just speaking briefly about, about Roman history, there's a fantastic historian called Cassius Dio, who wrote an 80-volume history of Rome in the third century.

SM:

Yes.

FH:

And what we have of it is incredibly incomplete. Uh, the first 35 books only survive in fragments. Um, 36 to 54 broadly intact, and we can use those as are 56 to 60, and they're very good sources. And the rest of it, the back end of the book only again, exists in fragments and a really, really badly written epitome of it. . .

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

. . . from an 11th century monk called John of -- lemme get this right -- John of Xi. . . Xiphilinus. Um, so, so, what divides and what doesn't. Um, and, and this is always a big problem, I, I, another Roman example, we know an awful lot about aqueducts because we have a book about them by a guy called Frontinus who tells us almost everything you'd want to know. . .

SM:

Yes.

[Laughter]

FH:

. . . the history, flow rate, distribution, infrastructure, leakage problems. And we only have this book because somebody found a scroll of it in a library in Monte Cassino in 1425 and decided it was worth a copy. Um, otherwise we'd just have the aqueducts. We wouldn't know what Frontinus tells us. So, so, you, you have that, that constant disconnect between what survives and what people find interesting enough to write down. And often what they find interesting enough to write down is not what we want to know, which is why we know very little about, you know, slavery or the role of women in the Roman world. Um, but back to, sorry, I'm digressing, which is. . . .

SM:

That's okay. That is fascinating stuff. And it's stuff I'm really interested in all the time. So, please do tell, you know. Carry on.

FH:

To come back to your, come back to your question is, is there a link between Zimri-Lim’s ice house and, and the yakchals we find later in Persia, which we do know a bit about. If there is, we can't see it. Um. . .

SM:

Right.

FH:

We know how yakchals works. Um, examples survive. We know they worked by a evaporative cooling. We even have a recipe for the specific mortar, which where they're made from. Um, but we have none of that for, for what they're doing in Mari. Um, and so, you know, that, that, that's, that chain, that evolution of ideas is, is, is entirely abs absent from the historical records. So, so, we just had to suppose, um, you know, and, and, and, and the yakchal, the yakchal is, is, is a brilliant, brilliant piece of technology. It works by evaporative cooling and, uh, you really need the climactic conditions that you have in, in Persia and, and indeed in, in Syria where at night it gets cold very, very fast. Um, and, and that evaporation that happens at that point you. . . allows you to create conditions whereby you can freeze water. Um, so, yes.

[Laughter]

SM:

It's, I guess, like all of these, you're going, yes, we guess about them. Um, I did hear just, uh, to go off the questions here, uh, that in the, uh, the a. . . Zimri-Lim’s, uh, mentioned or certainly early, they brought ice down from the mountains. . .

FH:

Yes.

SM:

Is this true? And then they used that on top of, uh, on top or at the side or whatever of these buildings. And this would cause the, the ice to be, um, to be kept and down in the bottom there they would keep things. And that was where the freezing was, as it were. Is this, what, is this what you are, I mean, you are, obviously, you're doing a lot of history about it, but you could tell us a little bit more about that.

FH:

Well, bringing ice down from the mountains is, is very much a part of historic ice. And, and generally speaking, when you, when you're bringing it down from the mountains, it's not necessarily ice, it's frequently snow.

SM:

Yeah.

FH:

Um, which is a bit, is, is less good. Um, it can be dirtier. Transporting it is difficult. You really have to compact it to make it not melt as fast. Um, but the problem is around, in, in Persia you do, you do have mountains where you can get ice. Around Mari, you really don't. Um, and, and in the 11th, you, you, to get ice that you can harvest, you really have to be in Lebanon and the mountains there. Um, and we know certainly looping way forward that that's where, um, people like Saladin would get their, their ice from. And it was, um, quite a big deal in, in, in, um, what's now Lebanon and Syria and Israel, um, in the sort of early modern period. Um, but you know, that, that is certainly one way of gathering it. And then you have to, to store it and try and make sure that it doesn't melt, which is always a course, the big problem.

SM:

Yes. I, it definitely is the big problem. Let, okay, let's move on. Let's move on.

FH:

[Laughter]

SM:

And it seems, it seems into a, um, we're gonna talk about ancient Greeks and Romans, you know. . .

FH:

Ooh.

SM:

. . . the Chinese, the, the Indian, and these are, uh, cultures that are going back many, many, you know, moons. Um, and yeah, obviously we've talked about those before them. Um, let's talk about them cuz they've developed lots of different systems, I think, to get ice. So, I would love, love, love to know. I mean particularly about, um, the Indians because a, I mean, it's our, I mean, relatively a hot country in the, in different parts. . .

FH:

Um-hmm.

SM:

. . . but, um, but also the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans and the Chinese, you know, perhaps you could tell us how they've collected snow or they collected anything in those countries.

FH:

Of course. Um, well the, the problem in Greece and Rome, and so, civiliz. . . um, civilized China at that point, um, you don't have deserts. So, you don't have that evaporative cooling potential that the Persians and, and the Maris had. So, you, you have to go to the mountain and get the snow and bring it down. And we know that that's happening, particularly in Athens, um, that people are bringing snow down to the market in Athens and using it, using it to cool wine in the fifth century.

SM:

Oh.

FH:

Um, so, so, so, we know they're gathering it. We know they're compacting it, we know they're selling it. Um, we know from a writer called Chares of Mitylene that the Greeks would store snow that they've gathered in pits, which they would insulate with, with oak, uh, branches. And Plutarch also tells us that they use straw and cloth. . .

SM:

Yes.

FH:

. . . as part of their installation practice. And, and this is a principle that we, that we know last, lasted at least into the 19th century of, of, of the common era. Um, and it's happening in, in Italy at that point. Um, and we know that, um, Pliny, uh, the Elder also tells us that, that, you know, snow is, is a problem because it gets really dirty. And so, what the Romans would often do is they'd take a vessel of pre. . . , a boiled water and put it into the snow pit, so, it would freeze into pure clean ice. And then they would use that.

SM:

Ah.

FH:

Which is a very, very clever solution. Um, and for some reason, hot water freezes faster than if you just put cold water into the ice. I'm not quite sure of the, I, I think it must be evaporative. I'm not quite sure of the science of that.

Um, uh, the Chinese are harvesting, storing ice in a similar manner that we, uh, as far as we can tell. Um, but in India, um, particularly in Allahabad, they're using evaporative cooling. Um, so, they'd take boiled, boiled water and put it in special pits overnight where it would freeze as everything got super cold, and then they'd gather the ice the next day. Um, which is, is, is, is very clever. And, and so, they're very, um, very capable at figuring out the science of that. Um, and cuz you, you have the heat and you have that massive temperature drop off as the sun goes down, um, as goes. . . .

[Barking]

SM:

Let's, uh, go on, because we're gonna scoop on a bit, I think from the Romans and the, um, to the medieval, uh, times, I think. Well probably about eighth, ninth, 10th century, little bit further forward than that. Um, because if you're looking at the early Middle Ages, we often think of them as the dark, excuse me, often think of them as dark ages. We often think of, which is a bad way of putting it. But, um, I want to know what they did with ice then, because they didn't, um, they weren't kind of as, I can't get it my word, so, get, let me get it. Um, they weren't as beholden to it as the people in the rest of the period were in the Romans and they went, they did go back in certain areas and this, and I think ice is one where they did go back. They used it where they could find it and they didn't use it where they could not get it. Do you think that's fair?

FH:

I think that's entirely fair. I we have to, we have to remember that in this era, ice is very much a luxury item. Um, and, and will be through until, you know, Frederic Tudor, who you mentioned at the top of the show. Um, and, and so, you know, it's, it's something that you, you can get if you can afford it. Um, and if there is a ready source available, like, you know, the mountains of the Apennines in Rome, or the mountains of the Lebanon, if you are Saladin. Um, and, and, and so, it, it, it's definitely there. I mean, you know, with, with Saladin, um, you know, there's a, there's a famous story of him sending ice to Richard I, his great enemy, to help him cure him of a fever. . .

SM:

Yes.

FH:

. . . which is certainly mythical. What isn't mythical is, um, after, and, and actually the, the, this particular scene is dramatized in Ridley Scott's film, “Kingdom of Heaven.” Um, Saladin has captured Guy d’Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, um, having just defeated him. He's also got, um, Guy’s co-commander Raymond de Châtillon with him. And Saladin has this chest brought to him and he's. . . opens up and full of, of ice. He scoops it up and he pours, throws water into it and gives it to, to gar, to Guy. Um, and Raymond takes it off, Guy, and drinks it without permission and Saladin basically kills him for it, for this slight. Um, and, and so, so, you know, it, it's definitely there and Kings have access to it.

There's another story about, um, a Milanese priest called Pietro Casola who goes on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1494. When he arrives at Jaffa, uh, the captain of his ship, ship is given a sack of snow, and he describes this as a great marvel and comfort cuz they use it to chill their drinking water. Um, so, you know, it's definitely there. And we have to remember, we, we often have this, this sort of Monty Python view of the. . .

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

. . . um, of this era of sort of mud and peasants. Um, but the, the Middle Ages were much more sophisticated than we oft, the people often give them credit for.

SM:

Agreed.

FH:

Um, and, and, and so, you know, these intelligent, sophisticated, pre-enlightenment people were definitely using ice, particularly at the upper echelons of society.

SM:

But in the, in the lower end, it was just not being used unless someone lived close to the ice.

FH:

Close to the ice. And but also at the lower end, you know, clean drinking water is a, is a problem.

SM:

Yes.

FH:

Um, which is why we have beer, ultimately. Um, you know, brewing cleans up. . .

SM:

Mm-hmm.

FH:

. . . gets rid of the microbes and, you know, hence the idea of small beer, very low alcohol for one-two percent beer, which means you can still function and that's, you know, hugely important in, in this era, so, that you can, you know, hydrate.

SM:

Absolutely. Fantastic. I mean, carry on.

FH:

No, no, no. I, I, I, I, I sort of come to the end of my point.

SM:

[Laughter]

Um, for me, the, um, the Renaissance spirit and I, well, again, we're leaping through the years a little bit here.

FH:

We kind of have to. Because there isn’t much there.

SM:

No, absolutely.

[Cross-Talk]

But when you, when you do, when we get, I think to the Renaissance spirit, we begin to hear it being mentioned all the time now. Uh, let's talk about. . .

FH:

Um.

SM:

. . . Buontalenti.

FH:

Buontalenti. What a guy.

SM:

Because I, I, I do consider him to breathe. . . the first kind of real person. . . . I get the, to bring the ice to, you know, the, the regular realm, shall we say. Per. . . perhaps he is the first person in history. Um, I mean, I mean, do you agree, first of all? Cause you might disagree. And, and what do you, what do you know about him?

FH:

Well, I do agree, actually. I, he's, and I, I would just qualify, it's like by saying the first person in recorded history.

SM:

Right.

FH:

Certainly, you know, but as far as we can tell, he is the man who has the first commercial ice concession, um, that we can name. And he's, he's quite the guy, Buontalenti. I mean, he's an architect, he's a designer, he's a weapons maker. I, he's a, a true renaissance man. Um, and, and, and clearly something of a genius. And, um, we know that the, the, and, and we should also mention that he's, he's living in Florence, um, under the, um, the Grand Dukes Medici. And, and we, we know that the, the, the Florentines have liked to chill their wine from at least the 1340s, maybe earlier. Um, so, we know that they're getting their, their ice broadly comes from the Apennines. Um, they bring it into Florence and, you know, chill down, you know, their glorious Tuscan white wines, you know, too full and like that.

SM:

Yep.

FH:

Yeah. And, um, and I, you know, those lovely whites around San Gimignano where those lovely lemony flavors. . .

SM:

Ooh.

FH:

. . . fantastic stuff. And, and so. . .

[Cross Talk]

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

It really is.

So, so, we know that that's going on. But it seems that once Buontalenti secures his concession from Grand Duke Ferdinand I around 1598, and, um, he, so, he's the first person to be selling it. He's building ice houses. Uh, there's a famous one in the Boboli Gardens, um, and selling it to, to regular, um, Fiorentini. And, um, so, he's probably the first person really to bring ice to the people in, in, in a much bigger way. But the, but what he's doing doesn't really seem to travel further afield. Um, around this time. You have quite a large volume of medical writing, just saying how ice is bad for you. Um.

SM:

Ah.

FH:

There's a lot, there's a lot of this going on. Um, but there's one dissenting voice, um, in, in, in Spain, and I think it's Cosimo I, um, Ferdinand’s father who basically commissions a translation into Italian because he likes the use of ice so much. Um, and, um, they, it's to try and make the counter case, actually, there's nothing wrong with the use of ice. Um, but, but there is an awful lot of sort of stuff going on about, about this at the time. It's sort of a bit like a, sort of, the anti-ice movement is a bit akin to the anti-vax movement, I suppose.

[Laughter]

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

Um, but yeah, it's a lot of stuff. But so, we, we can tell that it's popular cuz people are getting cross about it, um, in in, in the same way that in, in the Roman era, you have Seneca say, Oh, ice is a terribly bad thing. Um, you know, when people start saying something's bad, it's, it's plainly happening.

[Laughter]

Um, and, and that's very much going on in Florence at the time. Um, but it doesn't really seem to spread. I mean, you know, you, you would have thought that you might have something similar going on in Seville, for example.

SM:

Yep.

FH:

Um, and, and we know that ice is being traded in Seville at this era, and we know that it's there, but nobody's really writing about it. Um, and you would've, and what that often leads me to suspect, and again, this is entirely unprovable, but if nobody's writing about it, it’s probably fairly ordinary. Um, people. . .

SM:

Yep. Okay.

FH:

. . . tend to, to, to write about things, um, that seems, um, normal to them. Um, even if it is a luxury, um, you know, you don't sort of have large histories of perfume, for example, from this era. We know that people will spend, um, and, you know, we. . . the artifacts survive, little cosmetics cases. We, we, we know nothing, for example, about Roman cosmetics beyond archeological finds where we can find, you know, uh, little cases of rouge and lipstick and. . .

SM:

Yes.

FH:

. . . and, and, and stuff. We know it's there, but nobody writes about it because it's not interesting to them. It's interesting to ask, you know, we'd love to know more about it. Um, so, so, what's interesting about Buontalenti is, to me, is that he is doing something new. And I think that's why, that's why it's recorded. Um. . .

SM:

Do you think, I mean, we hear stories, you know, Catherine de Medici going to France and all of this and taking, you know, uh, chefs with her and blah, blah, blah, and it, it, it changes the world. . .

FH:

[Inaudible]

SM:

Of course. I mean, but why does that come into kind of our, our, our almost our kind of history? I mean, it has done, it has come in, it's, if you look at, you know, the, um, what what's on the internet and it'll all mention, Oh, well Catherine of Medici did this. And it's continued to be a kind of a story. Why do you think that comes in?

FH:

Oh, this is, this is, this is the, the lovely interplay of history and myth, um, which is a subject that I find particularly interesting. Um, and this is, this is always happened since the beginning of history. Um, we, you know, when you look at the beginning of Herodotus, he justifies the reason for writing his history of the Persian wars by saying, I am about to describe to you the greatest war that was ever fought. And he's basically saying, This is bigger than Homer. This is bigger than the Trojan War. And I'm gonna tell you all about it. He's setting himself up in explicit competition with Homer. But the point being that when he lived, Homer was considered to be true. Um, you know, and so, although Herodotus is making a fundamental sea change in the genre of writing and is actually writing history and talking to sources and recording it, even though they're mad digressions all the way through, which is why I love him so much, um, he is, he, he's drawing on a mythic archetype to create history. And, and ever since the two have sort of woven between each other. And, and, and so, when you get to sort of stuff about Catherine de Medici in, it's like, you know, why was French food. . . so, is French food so marvelous? Well, it's very easy to say, Well, you know, it's Italian food is great, and who is an, an Italian who marries in the French Royal House. What people conveniently forget, and it's a scene, um, dramatized in Antonia Fraser’s, um, biography of Marie Antoinette when she goes to marry, uh, the Dauphine Louis XVI, you arrive at the French border and everything that's Austrian in Marie’s case, or Tuscan in, uh, Catherine's case is stripped from you, and then you are put into French stuff and then you can cross the border. So, the idea that she brought all this stuff with her from Italy does not hold water. Um, she has to leave it all behind and become French.

SM:

Yeah. I think that's, I think, well, it's, that's a very definite, uh, uh, story then that were told. I, I mean, it, it strikes to me that she brought some things that are in her notion is, and that was something that she brought over, something that was in her mind that was a diff. . . .

FH:

Yeah.

SM:

But she never took ingredients with her. And that was my, so, that was my theory, that she had people who came over, she might say to them, Oh, here's how you make X, but I never knew whether she would take those over.

Let's, and that, and that takes us, I guess, to the origins of ice cream again, because a lot of people put her, um, as the, the kind of founder of the origins of ice cream, or at least one of the, uh, you know, the big kind of, uh, my mind is going, you know, I can't even get my words out. She brought ice cream with her to France, and then from France it went everywhere. That's the story that they will say. But, uh, from her, let's talk about it. How was ice cream invented? And, and let's, let's throw in gelato too.

FH:

There, there is some debunking to go on. Um.

SM:

Yeah.

FH:

And, and I, I, for start, when, when Catherine went to France, she was 14 years old. Um, and, um, so, you know, it's, it, it it's, it's very, very, very tricky. And, and when we talk about the, the, the ices of this time, um, they're much closer to sort of Turkish chilled sherbets or slush puppies than they are to actual ice cream. And, and, and one of the reasons for this is that the science of heat exchange is not understood in Europe at this point. It isn't understood in India. Um, certainly and, there’re Indian writings about, about this, that date back to at least the 12th century. Um, but they're not fully fathoms in Europe. And you, you have a fundamental problem if you want to make ice cream, which is cream actually freezes about half a degree lower than water.

SM:

Yes.

FH:

So, even if you, you put the cream in a bucket of ice, all you're gonna get is cold cream. Um, and, and, and, you know, as, um, was it, you know, Flanders and Swann in their song about thermo, thermodynamics, you can't pass heat from a cooler to a hotter. You can try it if you like, but you far better notter.

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

Um, it's so, so, what you've gotta work out is how do you make the water cold enough to freeze the cream. And this isn't really understood in Europe until about 16, 1670s. And the first person to record it is a French chemist called Nicolas Lemery. And, and the solution is brine. Um, brine freezes, um, but a much lower temperature, um, as you, we know from sea ice. And, and actually sea ice is not as salty as, as a good brine. And so, you, you can now get down to minus 16 Celsius or, or thereabouts, and that allows you to create ice cream, um, and, and drawing the, the warmth out of the mixture. Um, I'm getting it done. I, yes, I, so, I, I, I made a mistake. I looked at my notes, India, they've known about it from the second century, not the twelfth. In the Arab world, it's about 13th and thereabouts. But this knowledge doesn't arrive in Europe until, until the 17th century. Um, so, and that's when you start to get towards something that we would recognize as ice cream. Um, but in, in, in the earlier that, you know, even, uh, Louis XIV who was, and or Charles II, um, chaps who were famed. . .

SM:

Yes.

FH:

. . . their, their love of icy things didn't have it. Um, uh, you know, the, the, it comes that bit later. Um, and there's another reason why this probably doesn't happen sooner, um, beyond the actual knowledge of the technology of, of, of, you know, even if the scientific principles of heat exchange and thermodynamics aren't understood when Lemery is writing, um, the, the knowledge that it can happen arrives around then. But the other reason why it probably doesn't happen sooner is because salt is expensive. Um, and so. . .

SM:

Yeah.

FH:

. . . you're not gonna waste it on this because it is, it's a premium and necessary thing that costs a lot of money. Uh, and, you know, we, we, we forget because they're now, so, it's now so, [inaudible] to us that, you know, salt and pepper, which we take for granted on every dining table in the land.

SM:

Yes, we do.

FH:

Load of money. Um, hence, you know, the concept of the peppercorn contract.

SM:

Yeah.

FH:

You know, you pay a peppercorn because it's worth something. Now it, now it symbolizes, you know, in exchange of pepper contract, it's like 1 cent. But back then it represented very much more.

SM:

And, and how do you think, uh, with, just to mention kind of gelato as well, uh, how does that come into the situation in terms of what you are talking about?

FH:

That's a very difficult one again, because there, there, there's precious little evidence. But I think that gelato, I, I think that must be Tuscany again. Um, and, you know, I, you think sort of the, the famous ice cream houses like Vivoli in Florence, which is still getting strong, fantastic gelato. I love that place. Um, well worth a visit. Um, I, when I lived there briefly, I, I'd go and buy my ice cream at Vivoli and then go and sit on the steps at Santa Croce and enjoy it. Um.

SM:

[Laughter]

I, I never quite did that, but I did buy it when I was there.

[Laughter]

FH:

[Laughter]

And so, so, it, it's much more shrouded and the early recipes are, are, are much hard to find. Uh, a lot of recipe writing, um, in this era as far as I can make now, it's kind of an oral tradition. A lot of recipes are passed from cooks to cooks and confections to confectioners, and they're not necessarily written down. Um, I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm sure your research will, will, will bear this out. So, it is very hard to put a, a ground zero on gelato, um, uh, which is again, a very frustrating answer to your question.

SM:

But, no, that's, I mean, it's, I think it's, it's always interesting to try and do that and, you know, and yes, to put a, a big bang for all of it, but it's, it's sometimes it's just very improbable. So, that's, you know, perfectly acceptable. Um, okay.

FH:

One of the things that, that does bear saying is that once the code has been cracked, ice cream becomes very popular to those of you who can afford it. Um, and I think I, I, I put a line in the book or I basically say, Look, if, if you could afford servants, you can probably afford ice cream. But if you can't, you can't.

SM:

[Laughter]

That's a, I think that's a very good line. And I, you know, I think that's true, you know, and an ice cream suddenly wasn't available to those who didn't have the money at that point.

Let's talk about George Washington, shall we? Um.

FH:

Yes.

SM:

He, because let's, let's, let's go onto George Washington because one of the, I mean, he, one of the things I've learned over the years of writing many things about his, um, you know, his properties and all he had was that, um, he had a state of the art, as we like to call it, ice house in his grounds, at Mount Vernon.

FH:

Yes.

SM:

Um, but, but. . .

FH:

So, did Thomas Jefferson at Monticello.

SM:

Yes. I mean, they all had, well, certainly those who had, you know, the, the, again, the money. Um.

FH:

Yeah.

SM:

But I think, first of all, I think the first thing that we need to, uh, remember is that it was a slave brigade who built it. . .

FH:

Yes.

SM:

. . . that filled it up, that did all of this. And, uh, so, first of all, I'd love you to talk about that and then maybe talk about the ice house itself, which was, you know, a remarkable thing. But it was, it was built by enslaved people at the time and, and kind of not by George Washington, shall we say.

[Laughter]

FH:

No, I, I, this is, this is absolutely true. And, and these ice houses that we, we, we start getting in, in pre-revolutionary America are very much modeled on those being, um, built by members of the Court of Charles II, um, in the UK like, um, and, and later ones in the first laying out of the Gardens of Blenheim Palace, the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough. Um, these are very much the models for the ice houses that Washington, Jefferson had. Um, and the, the ones in, in, in Britain weren't built by slaves. Um, and, and may, maybe these ones, I'm not sure whether Washington's one, it certainly would've been stocked by slaves. Um, and because cutting ice is backbreaking horrible work, um, you know, nobody would want to do it. Um, not least because, um, a, it's bloody cold. Um, b, as you are working, oh, the, the, your clothes are broadly wool, um, your sweat soaks into it. So, when you do stop working, that sweat is going to freeze against your skin, assuming you're allowed a break.

SM:

Mm-hmm.

FH:

Um, and you have to do everything by hand. Um, you know, you're cutting ice out of the surface of the lake with pickaxes and saws and, um, trying to create movable, manageable blocks that you can then shift over. And it, yeah, it's a, it's a ghastly horrible, horrible job and would be until about 1825 when Frederic Tutor, Tudor, who we’re gonna come onto hooked up with a guy called Nathaniel Wyeth, um, who invented a thing called the Ice Plow. Um.

SM:

Mm-hmm.

FH:

I, it's it, yeah, it, it, it's, it's, it's ghastly stuff. But then, as is everything associated with slavery, I mean, you know, um, you and I both have a colonial background. Um, mine is Jamaica, and yes, slavery is an abominable evil thing. Um, and the things that people were made to do for no money and very little food and no rights is just shocking.

SM:

And yeah, and I think that's one of the things we kind of, I mean, people do know it now, but we do need to mention about George Washington because I think he's, Yeah, he is a person of his time, which is all well and good, but, uh, he's a person of a fairly evil time. . .

[Laughter]

. . .as well. Um, let, let's, uh, let's go on though to talk about one of my favorite men in history. And in fact, one of the things I'm going to do this year, we've done 80, 90 something episodes, I'm going to do a, a period, a series of, uh, kind of interesting men and women throughout history, just a little mentions of them, um, from all of the people I've done. Um, and, but one of my absolute favorites is Frederic Tudor uh, simply because he, he is, um, he goes through so, many bad businesses. He go, I mean, so, much that he has. And then he comes to this, this remarkable thing of, of shipping, you know, ice across to India, to Australia, to wherever, to, to Jamaica, to wherever and to, and to New Orleans. And, um, and I talk to, uh, Alton Brown about him as well, and he is just a remarkable character. But we're gonna assume that I haven't talked about him, and you are gonna talk about him now, cuz I want to listen. So, I'm just gonna listen. . .

FH:

[Laughter]

SM:

. . . to what you say because. . .

FH:

Well. . . .

SM:

. . . he's just an amazing man.

FH:

He really is. And it surprises me, um, now that I've done this book that I realize that so many people haven't heard of him. . .

SM:

Yes.

FH:

. . . because there's no question about it, Frederic Tudor changed the world, I, and with the most batty idea of shipping ice to, to the tropics. And he's, first of all, the idea is extraordinary. Um, and, but there's a very interesting question around, he started doing this in 1806. He ships his first cargo to Saint-Pierre in Martinique. And the people there have no idea what he’s brought.

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

Um, and you know, there, there, there's science writer called Steven Johnson who, who remarks on this is that showing these people ice would be like showing them an iPod. And, um, it, it, it, and there's a lovely, lovely story, I dunno if it's true or not, um, that, that somebody comes back having bought some ice from him, um, with whatever it was wrapped in, and the ice is melted. He's like, You sold me nothing. I want my money back. Um, and so, preposterous is the idea. And, and so, there's a very interesting question of, of where does the idea come from? And, um, cuz brilliant ideas re. . . rarely happen in isolation. Um, the, the idea of the mad genius coming up with something new that nobody has thought of is, is, is very much the exception rather than norm, um, in sort of the annals of invention and, and, and creation. Um, and Tudor himself writes to one of his potential investors in 1805 saying that he's heard of ice being sent from Norway to London. And people have often dismissed this because the formal Norway-London ice trade didn't really start until the 1820s with a guy called William Leftwich. But ice is clearly arriving in London because you have the great confectioners, Gunther and Negri. . .

SM:

Mm-hmm.

FH:

. . . making ice cream and selling it. They're getting their ice from somewhere. Where is it coming from? And Elizabeth David did a lot of work on this when her book, uh, Harvest of the Cold Months and going through shipping records, and she finds accounts of, of, of ice being landed in the Port of London. And there's one brilliant story. Um, the customs impounded because there's no port of embarkation. And the reason why there's no port of embarkation is because this ice has come of off an iceberg. Um, so, you, you, we have this phenomenon of whalers going out, and if they don't get whales and they want to get some money off the voyage, they bring back ice. Um, so, this is clearly going on. So, and, and Tudor knows about this. So, so, the idea isn't popping up in isolation. As to the idea of taking ice to the tropics, this idea comes from, um, what I believe is called the old China trade in Boston, um, which sort of began a couple of generations before Tudor, um, after, uh, the War of Independence. And the War of Independence entirely scuttled the American economy because Britain had largely kept all American trade for itself. They wouldn't let the Americans trade with the rest of Europe. Um, so, once they are independent, they have nowhere to trade with. And a bunch of guys in Boston suddenly realized, here in New England, we have a lot of ginseng, and we don't use it. And the Chinese. . .

SM:

Mm-hmm.

FH:

. . . like ginseng. So, they bought a ship, stocked up the hole with ginseng, shipped it around to Guangzhou, made a killing, used some of that money to buy China and silks and all the rest of it, shipped that back to Boston, made another killing, and all became incredibly wealthy. So, Frederic Tudor is basically looking for his equivalent of ginseng. It's like, what do we make in New England?

SM:

Mm-hmm.

FH:

Nothing. What do we have in New England? Ice. And he knows about ice because they have an ice house on his family's estate, a place called Rockwood, not far from Boston. Um, so, he, he knows about the whole concept of, of, of cooling drinks and all the rest of it. And so, he's, he basically stumbles on the idea of, if they could have cold drinks in the tropics, they're gonna love it. And that's basically where the idea comes from. Everyone thinks he's insane. Um, you know, the, the one of the Boston newspapers as his first cargo leaves port, you know, prints a very mocking report, you know, saying, We hope this isn't a slippery speculation.

[Laughter]

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

Um, and . . .

SM:

Fantastic.

FH:

And it, it takes a while for, for, for it to work for, for Tudor and his other, his other great asset beyond this, this insight is he's incredibly stubborn because things do not go well. Um, at first, you know, he, and he finds himself spectacularly in debt. Um, you know, the, the War of 1812, which actually lasts for three years means that he can't ship anything. And he spends all that time in research, research and trying to work out how to improve his insulation techniques, but getting deeper and deeper and deeper in debt. So, by the time the war is over, he's arrested for being so deeply in debt and his family managed to bail him out. And he just keeps going. Um, expanding from Martinique to Cuba, which seems to go quite well, uh, but still isn't making money to, um, Charleston and to Savannah. Um, the, these operations, excuse me, go, go fairly well as well, but other bits of the company are losing money. Um, and it's not until he starts going to New Orleans in 1824, things really work out.

SM:

Yeah. And New Orleans people really embrace ice in their drinks. And, and Tudor has a particular strategy, which is his theory is, is, and he writes this in one of, in one of his many letters, that if a chap has had a drink cold with ice for the first time, he won't want to go back to having that drink warm ever again.

SM:

Yes.

FH:

But when he arrives in a town, he will basically give ice to bartenders. Initially. And so, people start getting hooked on ice. He's, uh, the gateway drugs are booze and ice cream.

SM:

Yep.

FH:

And, and, and, and then he starts going into the icebox trade. And in Charleston, he starts selling ice boxes of his own design that you put the block of ice on the top and it keeps everything cool. Um, and he recognizes immediately that it's a bulk business. He wants to, he deliberately wants to break it out of the luxury model. And one of his agents in Cuba, a guy called Stephen Cabot, doesn't get it. And stubbornly sticks to the old model of this is a luxury item for the, for the rich. And, and Tudor’s writing saying, No, not, this is for everybody. He's a very explicit strategy of democratization, of, of ice, and, and ultimately it works for him. Uh, it basically leads, you know, his business into basically creating the first refrigerator society in North America. You know, that that's what the United States sort of becomes. And, you know, they're selling gangbusters amounts of ice. I mean, you know, New York alone is like consuming 4 million tons of stuff. Um, and it becomes utterly unremarkable very, very quickly to the, to, to the extent that, um, Jerry Thomas, the Godfather of Bar. . .

SM:

Of course. Yes.

FH:

. . . um, mentions ice as an, as an item once in his, in his book. Um, and he says, you know, ice should be kept clean, is basically all he says about it. Um, and, and suddenly ice is in every drink. And so, so, this comes back to the question that I started off is, when does ice get into the cocktail? And you go through all these old New Orleans, particularly, recipes and, and stories, and nobody can tell you, it just becomes de facto, um, there. So, it, it, it, it is the unanswerable question. Um, but in, certainly in the case of New Orleans and drinks like the Sazerac and all that, I would argue, 1824.

SM:

Of course.

FH:

[Laughter]

SM:

But it's interesting, I've had conversations with Dave Wondrich, who of course is very well known in the cocktail business, but, and he's got very, you know, uh, firm views of how it came in as well. So, um, the cock. . . yeah, the cocktail making, I think, is something we definitely need to talk about. I've never, I've done a couple of, uh, review, uh, uh, podcasts on those, but what, we'll need to spend some more time on that later because I want to talk to you about, well, you've mentioned a bit of it, how refrigeration kind of started, I think it was 1805, but, um, the first electric. . . do, well, am I wrong? You're gonna tell me am I thought it was about 1805, which was the first refriger. . . .

FH:

You're not wrong at all, but that [inaudible] that was invented in 1805 was never built.

SM:

Okay. But I think it was, I mean, okay. So, the first electric refrigerator I think was 1913, which was, okay.

FH:

Yeah.

SM:

So, it was like a hundred, a hundred years and, and a bit later. So, why don't you kind of take it from there onwards as much as you can. Uh, because I also want to make some time a, for you to talk about, um, you know, your, you know, your climate change point of view. Cause I want you to get that out. And I want to answer, let you have some fun questions as well. Well, I hope the rest of it is.

FH:

Great. Well, these are all fun questions. I'm having a great time. Um, I hope, I'm hope I'm not being too, too laborious. Um. . . .

SM:

No, no. Not at all.

FH:

The, the, the fridge is, is, is, is very interesting, um, a as just a concept because it, it works by basically creating a mechanical version of what the Persian Yakchal does. It's evaporative cooling. And, um, there are a number of things that, that, that steps that you kind of need to go through. It's before you can, um, you can get it to work. And so, so, the first bit of science was done in 1756 at the University of Edinburgh, where you have these two guys, William Cullen and Matthew Dobson and Dobson observed that if you, um, use a thermometer to measure the temperature of alcohol, and then you take it out of the alcohol, the temperature reading drops because the alcohol evaporates. And he says, Oh, there's something quite interesting going on here. What's going on? So, they start to, the two of them start to investigate it. Um, and they notice the same thing happens with the thermometer if you put in a vacuum chamber and suck out the air. And if you do both of these at the same time, the effect is incredibly pronounced. Um, so, what Cullen does is he gets a vessel of water and a smaller one of ethyl nitrate, and then he puts in the water and he puts that into the vacuum chamber, pumps out the air. The ethyl nitrate evaporates so much that the water freezes.

SM:

Huh.

FH:

So, this is the first step on the road of understanding thermodynamics. But they never follow up on it. The guys who do follow, a William Thompson, who will come on to called. . . go on to become Lord Kelvin, for whom the Kelvin temperature. . .

SM:

Of course.

FH:

. . . and James Joule, for whom Joule, a measure of energy is named, begin to work on this. Um, and they come up with what's known as Joule-Thompson expansion in 1852, whereby you take two flasks, one with gas and a vacuum in the other, and they're connected by a narrow tube. And then you pump the gas into the vacuum. As it fills the void in the vacuum flask, the temperature drops. And this basically is how a fridge works. Um, and so, the 1805 thing that you mentioned is in, created by a guy called Oliver, Oliver Evans. And he basically designs this fridge and only ever exists on, on paper, but it employs this gas exchange since. . . system that, um, Thompson and Joule are studying 50 years later. So, next guy is a bloke called Jacob Perkins, and he follows on Evans' work. Patents it. Builds it. Nobody wants it. Because it's expensive. And why would you want this machine when you can buy ice from Frederic Tudor at a fraction of the price?

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

Uh, you know, it, it makes no sense. But, um, it, it, it, so, the information is out there. So, then you have a guy called John Gorrie, who's a doctor in Florida who's been buying ice to cool down his malaria wards. And he would suspend big blocks of ice in, in, in the ceiling. And I think around about the time of the American Civil War, when his ice supply is basically cut off, he begins to look into making a machine. Um, and he invents something that's very similar to the Evans and Perkins designs. Um, but he uses air to inject into the vacuum rather than ether. And he's convinced it's gonna be huge. He goes into the fridge business. Tudor starts taking out ads saying that this machine ice is bad for you and dangerous, and you. . .

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

. . . should stick with [inaudible]. Um, Gorrie's business partner dies. And he goes bust, and then he dies himself. He's absolutely, it just doesn't work for him. Um, next guy we have is a British guy in Australia called James Harrison, who invents a, an ice machine that's basically the size of a small house in 18. . . .

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

So, it's entirely impractical for a domestic thing, but it's brilliant on ships for transporting perishable, and it's brilliant for breweries.

SM:

Yes.

FH:

Which of course you can, and the Australians would love. You know, this is the origin of the phrase, fancy a cold one, mate?

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

Um, and, um, and, and it, it goes from there. And then you have a guy called, Carl von Linde in Germany. Um, again, breweries love it. The Guinness Brewery in Dublin commission him to build them a system, um, for, for, for their breweries. So, these are machines that are being bought by, um, fish businesses, breweries, slaughter houses. Um, but it's a very niche business to business thing. Um, so, natural ice is, is, is really still what everybody uses until we get to the turn of the 19th, 20th century. Um, when ice, natural ice develops a bit of a hygiene problem, should we call it.

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

Um, people are cutting ices from pollute ice, from polluted rivers. People are getting sick. Um, it's, it, you know, in, in 1907, um, the Hudson River, which had been a big source, was basically declared unfit for human consumption.

SM:

Yes.

FH:

Um, and, and, and so, something has to shift, and this is the thing that basically makes the fridge possible. Um, but at the same time, you have to realize that the year, the year before this, this, this Hudson River incident, um, New York was basically getting three, 4 million tons of ice a year in 1906. And a time in ice machines could really only knock out about 700,000 tons of the stuff. So, so, you need, you need a shift. Um, and that shift happens around the time of the First World War when you get three independent sort of inventions and patients, patents happening 19. . . 8. . . 13, 1914, 1916. Um, and, and this is where the fridge really begins to happen. Um, and the, the, the second of those student, and Nathaniel Wales and Alfred Mellowes, their, their fridge is basically going to become the company's Kelvinator and Frigidaire. Um, and they've come up with a, with basically a system that you can create this technology and fit it into a cabinet as opposed to a large house. Um, and you can have ice that won't give you typhoid. Um, and that's which that, that's, that's the breakthrough. Um, but there's another problem, uh, is a lot of their refrigerating agents are actively poisonous. And so, should the seal on the refrigeration system break, people will die. And they do. Um, and, and, and it, this becomes a, a big enough problem that, that even Einstein got in on the act of trying to invent the non-toxic refrigerator. Um, but the guy who, who cracked the solution was, um, a man called, um, William Midgley, who basically invented the, um, CFC. CFC.

SM:

Right.

FH:

The chemical that was responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. Um, but this was a, a, a stable, non-toxic, seemingly brilliant solution, right? And nobody could have had any idea what CFCs were gonna go on to do to the world. Um, well, I, I. . . . It's often said that Midgley is, is probably the man responsible for more human death than anyone who hasn't started a war, because he was also the guy who invented lead petrol. Um, uh, and yeah, so, he's, he's, he's quite a character. He ultimately, um, sort dies by strangling himself with his own sort of Wallace and Gromit contraption that he invented to get out of bed. Um.

[Laughter]

It's a really interesting character, but he's the guy who basically made the fridge stable. And, and throughout the Depression, despite the Depression, Americans are buying fridges in droves. Um, I mean, by 

the time you get to the Second World War, so, many people in the United States have refrigerators. It's staggering. Almost nobody in the UK does at this point. Um, in fact, fri. . . fridge level wouldn't catch up with the United States in Britain until at least the 1970s, which I find quite. . .

SM:

Yeah. Yeah, I find that. Yeah.

FH:

Um, but, but, you know, the, the fridge transforms our lives. Um, you know, the food writer Bee Wilson describes it as the modern hearth, um, you know, where once we gathered around the fireplace, now we gather around the fridge. Um, which, I think, is a really interesting parallel.

SM:

I think, I mean, I think first of all, that's a great way of bringing in from the 1750s through to now, uh, in a remarkable way. So, thank you for that. Um.

FH:

My pleasure.

SM:

I wanted to, I wanted to make some time at the end of this for you just to talk about the, the climate change and what you brought in at the end of this when you talked about it, you know, uh, in the way of that Roman gentleman who wrote it. And, and so, now we'll give you an ex. . . a chance at the end just to bring it in right at the end and just, and, and give some people some, uh, you know, of, of your view of climate change and what your, and what you think about it.

FH:

Well, first off, there is, there is no doubt in my mind that climate change is real. It's happening right now. And the big question is, do we have enough time to do anything about it? Um, these sort of things, they, they, they happen on, on. . . . Climate change seems to me is a bit like, um, that character in, in, in the Hemingway book who's a asked how he went broke, and he replies gradually and then suddenly.

SM:

Yeah.

FH:

And that's what we're seeing right now. Um, I mean, we are gonna have a horrific hurricane season this year because the planet has been so much warmer and warm seas is what powers hurricanes and typhoons as we move into the autumn. Um, it, it, the glaciers are demonstrably, um, shrinking. Um, but what, what's interesting to me, I ultimately is not so, much that it is happening, and I, the science is settled and has been settled since at least the 1980s, if not earlier, Um, apart from a few quacks who are trying to say that it's not.

SM:

Yes.

FH:

And, and, and, and when people speak to them, there's a brilliant, uh, photographer called James Balog, who's chronicles a lot of the, um, ice shrinkage on glaciers, and you can see it in a fantastic documentary about him called, Chasing Ice. And he, he likens the, the scientist who deny, deny the science and saying, Look, you've got toothache, right? So, you go to dentist and he says, Your tooth’s got to go out. You know, 49 out of 50 dentists tell you the tooth has got to come out. Why do you go with the one? He says, Nah, it's fine. Um, and I think that's quite a good parallel. Um, but what was really interesting to me is trying to understand a, how we've got to this, this place where it's become such a politically charged topic where, where it wasn't. And, how did that happen? What was the chain of ideas that brought us to this position? And, and, and to understand, you know, how we've failed to tackle it. And what's very interesting, um, there's a book by a guy called Nath, Nathaniel Rice, I think his name is called Losing Earth. And it's basically about this very topic, and he, it in we mentioned, um, CFCs. And when the, um, the sort of, quote, hole in the ozone layer, unquote, was, was revealed in, in, in the late eighties, everyone went, Oh my gosh, we've gotta do something about this. We've gotta do it now. Um, and there are two driving factors behind that. The first is there's a brilliant visual representation, which is the i. . . , this idea of a hole, which is not strictly inaccurate way of what the thing of what's going on, but it's some demonstrable that people can latch onto and they can see immediately. Climate change doesn't have that. Carbon emissions don't have that. And the second thing is, there's an immediate threat with CFCs and ozone depletion of skin cancer.

SM:

Yep.

FH:

I could get skin cancer to, because of this, that provides an enormous impetus to act. Um, and so, we did, uh, with the Montreal protocol of 1989, which was a brilliant piece of global legislation hammered out during the Cold War, agreed, implemented. And it's been proven to work. So, what they wanted to then do was to try and in, enact something very similar to that based around carbon. Um, and in fact, George, uh, Bush Senior, um, campaigned on this issue. Um, you know, he, he went out, you know, the environment, environment things was, was entirely a non-partisan issue in the eighties. Bush campaigned as an environmental president. Dan Quail went out and said, You know, we're gonna fix this. We are the environmental guys. Um, and somehow this shifted, and I think a lot of that can be put at the door of Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu, um, who just wasn't interested. Every time the topic would come up, Bush would say, deal with John. Um, and Sununu didn't care, um, to the extent that when they got to the conference, which was meant to produce this, um, protocol, which was held in, in Holland, um, I think in 1991 or thereabouts, um, you know, the climate scientists waiting outside who weren't in the conference, and were trying to find out what's going on, trying to get ideas of what's going on called the Norwegian delegates, he's on his way to the bathroom, he said, and say, What's going on in there? And the Norwegian guy says, Your government is [bleep] this up. Um.

SM:

Yeah.

FH:

Excuse language, you can bleep me. Um, but that's a direct quote. And, and, and so, it all falls apart. The political will to deal with this at a time when it would've made substantive difference to our environment, um, was lost. And there's never really been, um, recaptured despite all the various COP conferences and all the various sort of, you know, Yes, we must do something. This is terribly important. That we are looking at this massive amount of inaction. And I think a lot of it is because we as a species are very bad at understanding risk.

SM:

Yes.

FH:

If it's not an immediate threat to us as an animal, it's like, wow, they can't wait till later. Um, but I think what we're seeing now with the weather patterns around the world is it is becoming a real risk. I mean, you know, you can't imagine the idea of there being no ice on Antarctica or no ice in Himalayas, uh, for example. Um, but to take the Himalayas first, if the glaciers melt in the Himalayas, we're switching off a number of the world's great rivers, and therefore the water supply to Asia in general. Uh, you lose the Ganges, you lose the Mekong, you lose the Yangtze, you lose the Let. . . Yellow River, they, they would just stop if there's no ice in the Himalayas. Um, more frightening is there's a glacier on Antarctica called Thwaites Glacier, which is sometimes known as the Doom Date. . . Doomsday Glacier. Um, if Thwaites, Thwaites basically holds back the Antarctic ice shelf, if Thwaites goes and all of that ice melts, there is a very, very strange phenomenon. It's very understudied and there's not a lot of data. Scientists, um, called Mark, um, I'm gonna mispronounce his sur, surname now, Mark Miodownik, uh, writes about. And the ice. . . the Earth is in its center is basically liquid. Right? Every continent, as we know, floats on this liquid. And the ice on Greenland or Antarctica presses the earth in those places down into that liquid without the ice they bob up.

SM:

Mm-hmm.

FH:

And what does that do to the planet? And we don't understand it yet, but it means that some places are gonna rise and some places are gonna go underwater. Um, and that's a very real possibility. It sounds preposterous. And these ideas are, and this is one of the reasons why people find it very easy not to think about the climate, um, because, you know, it's like it's not gonna happen now. And, and also it's very hard for us to imagine how little old us as one person that has any effect on a planet. But the thing is, and largely thanks to ice and refrigeration and all [inaudible], there's now 7.5 billion of us.

SM:

Yes.

FH:

That does have an effect on a planet. Um, and so, so, that's why the climate change stuff became interesting to me.

SM:

Fantastic. And that's a, a great description of it. It's, uh, I've read all about all of this and particularly, you know, you mentioned, uh, the little bit at the end. Um, it's very important. It's important. And we have people across, you know, the scale of this who are listening it, it's just the honest thing that we have, um, that we have, um, you know, people who are Democrat people, people who are Republican. It's, it's an odd thing. Um, but I hope they listen to what you are saying because it is, it's a genuine thing and it seems slightly. . . .

[Cross talk]

FH:

. . . the book and find out how we get to this place.

SM:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, they, we are going to tell 'em how to find you on Instagram and Twitter and all of that in a, in a few moments. It seems slightly odd now to do some fun questions, but we have. . .

[Cross talk]

SM:

They have. Yes. But, but we, we've asked you some questions about your, your wonderful, wonderful book, and I will tell everyone go and get it. It's a terrific book. It really is.

FH:

Thank you.

SM:

And, um, we, I'm sorry, I'm looking at my kosher with festival that I'm, um, I want you to go out and buy it. Have, have fun. Just listen to it. It's a fantastic book. Um, but now let's have some fun questions to answer.

FH:

Yes.

SM:

So, let's, uh, let's have a look at these. Um, if Fred Hogge was a meal and it's gotta be icy, I guess, what would it be?

FH:

Well, I think I kind of sort have to lean towards my surname on this one. I mean, you know, there's a number of pictures. I was at school.

[Laughter]

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

Um, so, so, so, so, so, maybe that, but um, there, there's, there's some debate within the family about where the name comes from. Some, some people think it derives from Hoggets, which is like halfway between lamb and mutton.

SM:

Yes, absolutely.

FH:

Some people. So, so, maybe a lambs stew, but then the other half of them thinks it's Belgian and comes from the name Herger. So, I, I'm gonna go with Moule Frites.

SM:

Okay. Moule. There you go. That's brilliant. And we've never had a Moule Frites yet in the competition. Yes.

FH:

Okay, good.

SM:

And now if you could select, and this is a, a great one for you, I think. If you could select any specific meal in history or any period in history really, uh, what would it be?

FH:

Uh, you see, I've been thinking about this way too much.

[Laughter]

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

I mean, it’s like, you know, do you go Roman and sort of Apicius and all that stuff. And, and, and, and honestly, I think that I would have to say sort of like the late fifties, early sixties, um, and my, my great screenwriting hero, Emeric Pressburger used to take his Grand Tour and drive into France with the Michelin guide before it all became sort of too pretentious. Um, and, and, and just go to all these brilliant French regional country res. . . places like, you know, place loved by Julia Child and Elizabeth David.

SM:

Oh. So wonderful.

FH:

I think it would, it would have to be either that or one of the epic roast boar feasts at the end of an Asterix comic.

SM:

Oh, well, I love Asterix as well, so, that's perfect for me. But I will let either of those go. So, that's fantastic. And, and here's the thing. And you are not allowed to mention refrigeration, not because someone mentioned it last time and that was their choice. And also it's too, you know, for you to say. . .

FH:

[Laughter]

SM:

. . . too much. Um, so, what do you consider, uh, to be the greatest invention in food history?

FH:

We, this is. . . . Depends, I suppose in part it depends what it me, what we mean by greatest. So, I'm gonna translate greatest to mean the most impactful.

SM:

Okay.

FH:

Um, on, on, on, on, on history and, um, around the turn of the millennium, um, back in those heady days of 1999, the, um. . .

SM:

Oh gosh.

FH:

. . . The Times commissioned Umberto Eco to write a piece about what is the greatest in invention of the previous turning of a millennium. And this is always stuck with me. And I think that it, it comes down to, and it is the most significant thing in food history, and it was Europe's learning how to grow pulses.

SM:

Oh.

FH:

Um, peas, legumes, lentils.

SM:

Yes.

FH:

Um, because throughout what we call the Dark Ages between sort of 500 or so, the end of the Roman Empire to the year 1000, the European population has been falling. Uh, there’s insufficient food, there’s insufficient nourishment. Um, and around that time around, um, the year 1000, they suddenly work out how to grow beans. And from that moment on, the European population grows, um, significantly and increasingly. So, you could therefore argue that if they hadn't figured that out and the European population continues to decline, the world that we live in doesn't happen in the same way. There would be no colonization of America. There will be no excess of white people to go into the world and do terrible things. Um, so, it is the most impactful moment in food is that, is that moment learning to grow beans.

SM:

Fantastic. I, again, these are all very, very, very, you know, special answers. These are great. Um, now. . . .

FH:

Thank you.

SM:

They. . . . Now, let's tell everyone how they can get ahold of you on, you know, all the regulars, Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. And I'm guessing, are you, are you a, a user of TikTok?

[Laughter]

FH:

Do you what I, I, I'm not a user of TikTok. I haven't quite figured it out, but I, I am, I, I am aware of it.

[Laughter]

SM:

I did. I did go on it for, I did go on it for a short while. We haven't done any for a while. So, if you could tell everyone though, where you can get hold of you on Instagram and Facebook and whether you have a public page and all of all of that.

FH:

I, I don't have a public Facebook page, but the other two are public, Um, on Instagram, I'm at Fred Hogge, all one word. . .

SM:

Okay.

FH:

. . . where you'll get lots of pictures of Maya and Boonma and Ruffy, and. . .

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

. . . a few things around Thailand and, and, and plates of noodles. Um, on Twitter, I'm at Hogge underscore Fred, it used to be at Fred Hogge, but I called a journalist by a very naughty word and I got banned, uh.

[Laughter]

So, I won't be doing that again. Um, and, um, and, and I'm there and you'll get all kinds of stupid stuff about this book and about movies and about, um, things that are going on in the world. And, um, yeah.

[Cross talk]

SM:

Sorry. It's a very, I will say that, uh, uh, following Fred on Twitter is very enjoyable. Um, I think we, I think we, I think we shared some stuff last night about Buzz Luhrmann or whatever his name was, who was. . .

FH:

Yes, yes. . .

SM:

. . . don’t like, who I don't like very much, uh, normally, but I, I loved his thing on Elvis, and I am a big Elvis fan, so, and, uh, but I don't like his film terribly much.

FH:

I haven't seen it yet. I'm looking forward to it. I, I find Baz Luhrmann and a bit of a curious egg. It can be hit and miss, but I have a huge affection, as I think I said to you for his film Australia, because it's basically sort of Red River meets the Wizard of Oz meets. . .

SM:

[Laughter]

FH:

You know, it's wonderful homage to the movies and, and, and yeah, the first act is a bit, takes a while to settle, once it settles, I love it. I love it to pieces and the score. David Hirschfeld. The score for it is a thing of beauty.

SM:

It has been a, a pleasure to meet you after, you know, sharing all this stuff on Twitter and stuff. It's been, um, a real, real, real great pleasure.

FH:

Thank you.

OUTRO MUSIC

SM:

Do make sure to check out the website associated with this podcast at www dot Eat My Globe dot com where we will be posting the transcripts from each episode, along with all the references and resources we used putting the episodes together, in case you want to delve deeper into each subject. There is also a contact button, so please do let us know if there are any subjects that you would like us to cover.

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Thank you and goodbye from me, Simon Majumdar, and we’ll speak to you soon on the next episode of EAT MY GLOBE, a podcast about things you didn’t know you didn’t know about food.

CREDITS

The EAT MY GLOBE Podcast is a production of “It’s Not Much But It’s Ours” and “Producer Girl Productions.”

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Also, a huge thank you to Sybil Villanueva for her help with research and the preparations of the transcripts for this episode, which can be found on the website.