[Sca-cooks] medeival refrigeration

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

>
> Greetings unto the list. I have noticed that it is time for one of my weird questions, not having posed any of late (24 hrs?) haha
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>      Did medeival people take advantage of snow and cold weather to refrigerate things? How far back does ice production and this type thing go? I remember 'ice-houses' in history class, just not any type of time era.
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>      Did they make SNOW ICE  CREAM???
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>      Over the last 72 hours, my property has gotten over 22" of snow. The first day, it all melted but about 3" or so. I came home from school Thurs night to 10" (yep, measured it and even took pictures because we were just laughing about snow and my house earlier. My property is in a 'weather trough' that gets a huge amount of snow. When you go to the end of my driveway and turn either right of left, when you go 200 years either way, the snow is so drastically reduced that people have a hard time believing that I get as much as I do. My place looks like a crystal fairyland.). Anyway, I shoveled all that (yuck) and this morning I got up to another 3" of fresh stuff.
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>      Yes, I made snow icecream (cooked egg, cream, sugar and vanilla custard mixed with snow). To chill it off after cooking, I put it in a snow drift.This is what started me thinking about it. I don't think that they really realized the food benefits of refrigeration back then, but surely they would have made use of it in some way... wouldn't they? Just pondering.
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> Isabella, having a fresh cup of coffee with Emeril.
>
Well, in my time and place (England, 1203), there probably wasn't a whole
lot of snow in the winter. England and Ireland get the benefit of the Gulf
Stream, so the latitudes that in the US have (or should have, don't get me
started on the lack of snow that we've had this winter) multiple feet of
snow by January, in the UK might get a hard freeze.

Oh, heck, was it Menagier who talks about how long a chicken will last in
the summer vs. in the winter?

France also gets the benefits--LaCrosse, Wisconsin is about the same
latitude as Nice, France, and you don't hear Nice described as an ideal
location for ice fishing.

Conversely, it doesn't get nearly as hot there as it does here.

But we were talking about cold.

Perhaps using the natural preservation benefits of cold weather was so
commonplace that nobody bothered to mention it? I know around here, those
of us who use our porches as wintertime freezer expansion don't discuss it
amongst ourselves, because we're all familiar with it. Mostly it gets
brought up in discussions with people from warmer climes.

Margaret