I cannot even imagine living without a refrigerator. My grandmother has told me stories of when she was young and her parents had an ice box. She said all the children in the neighborhood would get so excited when the iceman would come to deliver ice and for a treat he would shave off a piece of ice for them. Her mother would go to the grocery store almost daily to purchase meat and their milk was delivered every other day. I used to sit for hours and listen to her tell me stories of hanging clothes out to dry and using a wringer washing machine. They lived in Pennsylvania and had a coal furnace and no air conditioning.
I thought about this when I read this chapter on the dilemma they faced about not being able to keep leftovers because they didn’t have a refrigerator. It was also interesting to learn how inventive these people were. It was fascinating to learn how they harvested winter ice from ponds and packed it in a shed using sawdust from the lumber mills and packing it tightly to insulate the walls of the shed. Brende help solve his problem by putting his leftover in a jar and dropping it in the buckets of water he had stored at his place.
My other grandmother lived in West Virginia and told stories of her mother cold packing their meats and storing them in a shed they built over a cold stream. This chapter sure brought back memories for me.
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Wow! This chapter makes me think that I have to talk to my grandmother more often, and really listen to how things have changed because that sounds absolutely incredible to me. I know nothing about chemistry, even in the most basic sense and have no idea how ice packed in sawdust in the middle of the summer can survive that kind of heat. What did your grandmother do when it was summertime? Was the stream always cool enough to little shed?
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