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Chillin' at the symposium with Plato: refrigeration in the ancient world.

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INTRODUCTION

During the nineteenth century several methods of producing cold were developed and used for industrial purposes and have since become common. The three main methods were machines that operated by: compressing and evaporating refrigerants, pioneered by Perkins (1834); expanding compressed air, pioneered by Gorrie (1844), and absorption machines, pioneered by Carre (1859) (Thevenot R., 1979). Just preceding, and parallel, to the development of mechanical refrigeration systems a global trade in natural ice also developed. The pioneer of this trade was Frederic Tudor who first exported commercial quantities of ice from Boston Lakes to the Southern US in 1806 (Anon. 1932). By 1856, Tudor's company (and a small number of competitors) exported American ice to England, the Caribbean, South America, the Persian Gulf, India, Southeastern Asia, Hong Kong, Manila and Australia; in 1857 (the peak year) 146,000 tons of ice were exported from Massachusetts (Dickason, 1991). Ice was also exported from Norway (Thevenot R., 1979). As well as ice, some perishable products were exported such as fruit, and ice-creams (Anon. 1932), but these were in fact less profitable (about 30% profit) in comparison to selling the ice itself (about 40-50% profit; Dickason, 1991). The global ice trade eventually failed from about 1880 onwards, largely because mechanical refrigeration systems became cheaper and more reliable (Forbes, 1958).

However, the use of ice, or snow, in food has a much older pedigree than the nineteenth century, as throughout antiquity many civilizations made use of ice or snow. They were able to store ice and snow out of season and were even capable of engineering systems to produce ice or cool water. The ancients typically used this ice or snow to cool wine for drinking, (Curtis, 2001; Forbes, 1958; Fiske 1932). Possibly some fruit or vegetables were also preserved via chilling, and they certainly were in ancient China (Schafer, 1977) but, the very high cost of unseasonal ice seems to have restricted its use with low value products in Europe. Certainly meat was not chilled and was normally either slaughtered immediately prior to consumption or preserved through drying or salting (Curtis, 2001). In the following paper the reported use and manufacture of ice and snow are examined in a number of civilizations, which left either literature or artifacts describing their activities.

MESOPOTAMIA ICE-HOUSES

Some of the first literate, urban civilizations (Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria) arose in Mesopotamia and documentary evidence has been discovered that they stored ice in special ice-houses. There appears to have been a cold-house in the city of Ur, in about 2000 BC, ice-houses at the cities of Terqa and Saggaratum on the Eurphrates river, during the reign of king Zimri-lim of Mari (about...

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