Toasty Fridges and Frosty Frozen Peas

As you may recall, I currently hang my hat in America. I was just looking at the fridge in our kitchen and thinking how big it is compared to the ones I grew up with in England.

My mum never even saw a fridge when she was a little girl. All they had at her house was a metal box covered with a damp towel, which they kept in the cellar because it was the coldest place in the house. The water evaporating from the towel cooled the box a little more.

Even when Mum and Dad got married, they didn’t buy a fridge because these appliances were so expensive. Everything changed when I was born. Mum says she persuaded Dad to buy a refrigerator because I was her precious poppet (well, obviously!).

Our fridge was a small, clunky, counter-height device (about the same size as a modern dishwasher). Unlike today’s fridges, which are powered by electricity, ours was powered by the same coal gas used to run the stove in the kitchen, but don’t ask me how. This meant that our fridge was delivered and installed by two men from the coal gas company.

Very few people owned fridges in those days. The people who made fridges wanted to sell more of them, so they asked my mum to host a party at our house for the ladies at our church. This party took place one Saturday, a couple of weeks after the workers from the gas board had installed the fridge.

Two ladies from the fridge company came to the party. They brought a lot of food, which they cooked in front of the ladies from the church. They created various tempting treats that could be cooked in a hot oven in just a few minutes.

The clever part was that they cooked more food than everyone could eat, so… wait for it… wait for it… they put what was left over in the fridge to keep it fresh so it could be eaten later! All the ladies said “Ooh” and “Aah” and went home to tell their husbands about the wonders of fridges.

We think of fridges as being cold, and they are inside, but since our fridge was powered by burning gas, it also kept our kitchen toasty warm!

We moved to a different house a few days before I’d completed my third orbit around the Sun. As part of that move, we ended up with a more modern fridge that was powered by electricity. This new beast had a teeny-tiny freezer compartment. This sounds a lot posher than it was because this “compartment” was really just a small metal box with a pull-down flap that was mounted inside the top corner of the fridge.

The freezer compartment was big enough to hold only a small metal tray containing six ice cubes or a bag of frozen peas. But since there was nowhere to actually buy frozen peas, we had to settle for being the proud owners of six ice cubes.

Just to add to the fun, the freezer compartment slowly became encrusted with ice. After a couple of months, you couldn’t open the freezer flap. Then, a week or so later, you couldn’t close the fridge door either.

I remember when we (by which I mean "not me") had to defrost the fridge. My mum would unplug it, empty the contents onto the kitchen counter, and hammer away at the ice with a kitchen knife. Chips of ice flew everywhere, leaving a giant puddle of icy water spreading across the floor.

My teddy bear, Big Ted, and I would watch all this activity with great interest. I remember one such occasion in particular. I still don’t know how Big Ted managed to fall into the pool of freezing water on the floor (I couldn’t take my eyes off him for a moment), but he ended up soaking wet. He was lucky he didn’t catch a cold.

As I mentioned earlier, we didn’t buy frozen food because there was nowhere to buy it from until... one day... I found my mum with a gaggle of other ladies chatting breathlessly about a revolutionary new development. They said a frozen food shop had just opened.

From the way they were talking, I got the impression this was the first establishment of its kind in the whole of Sheffield. After the ladies had left, Mum put me in our car and told me we were going to visit this new wonder to see it with our own eyes.

Unfortunately, the words the ladies had used (“frozen food shop”) were open to multiple interpretations. They meant a shop that sold frozen food (think “frozen food shop”), but I thought they were talking about a food shop that was frozen (think “frozen food shop”).

As a result, I was looking forward to visiting a shop encased in a gigantic block of ice, so I was very disappointed when we arrived at what seemed to be a typical little store.

The sign on the wall outside said, “FROZEN FOOD,” so no one would be confused. When we went in, all you could see were rows of chest freezers, each containing different frozen foodstuffs, like meats, pies, fruits, and vegetables.

There were so many choices that Mum became flustered and didn’t know what to do, so we bought a bag of frosty frozen peas and returned home to tell everyone about our adventure.

Remembering all this made me wonder what my mum would have thought back then in the early 1960s if she could see the frozen food sections in the supermarkets of today. If I ever manage to get my time machine working, maybe I’ll pop back and give her an enjoyable and interesting day out.

What do you think about all this? If you also hail from the old days, like me, do you have any memories you’d care to share? Alternatively, if you are younger and have only ever known a world populated with giant fridge-freezers filled with frosty frozen foods, has this column made you more aware about how rapidly things have changed in what has really been only a few short decades?

As always, I welcome your captivating comments, querulous questions, and sagacious suggestions, all of which you can share on Hackster's "Throwback Thursdays" Discord channel. I look forward to seeing you there.

P.S. Don't forget that you can peruse and ponder all of my Throwback Thursdays columns here.