Empire of drinksFood This article is more than 9 years oldNo ice please, we’re British
This article is more than 9 years oldA luxury item in 19th-century Britain, ice is still treated here as something of a novelty
There are two things that American visitors to Britain complain about. The first is having separate hot and cold taps on hand basins rather than a mixer tap. So pressing is this problem that the Wall Street Journal ran an article about it and Boris Johnson felt obliged to issue a statement saying that British plumbing “is an incentive to get it over and done with and not waste water”.
The second is the lack of ice in the hospitality trade. When one orders tap water in a restaurant it is, more often than not, warm. Most pubs still use a bucket full of partially melted ice for making gin and tonics. Americans are baffled by this. They have had a regular supply of ice since the 19th century. They would harvest ice in the winter and store it in specially designed ice boxes to keep it frozen.
Ice became madly fashionable in Victorian England... it was a barbarous time, when people drank their claret chilled...The Chinese, of course, were there first. Elizabeth David noted that “the harvesting and storing of ice are recorded in a poem of circa 1100BC in the Shih Ching, the famous collection of Food Canons”. In 1838, the New York Mirror wrote how an ice box ‘‘is now considered as much an article of necessity as a carpet or dining-table”. British visitors in the 19th century were surprised to find that Americans generally drank nothing but iced water with their meals.
By the late 19th century, steamship technology allowed ice to be harvested in vast blocks in America or Canada and sped across the Atlantic to be sold as a luxury item in British department stores. Ice became madly fashionable in Victorian England for those who could afford it. According to George Saintsbury, a literary critic and pioneering wine writer, it was a “barbarous time”, when people drank their claret chilled and put ice cubes in their champagne.
It proved a passing fad and never caught on for the ordinary drinker, as the ice was much too expensive. But even when artificial refrigeration became commonplace, ice still never became ubiquitous in Britain. It’s not that we don’t appreciate an iced drink in the right climate: the ultimate hymn to the joys of a cold beer, Ice Cold in Alex, is a British film. But at home, our national beer is served cool, not freezing. We don’t have scorching summers like they do in America, or indeed Egypt, so for British people, ice is still not an essential. And the hot and cold tap thing? Why, that’s purely to annoy visitors.
- Henry Jeffreys is a drinks writer based in London. His first book, Empire of Booze, will be published by Unbound in 2016. Twitter: @henrygjeffreys
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