Just a few years after World War II ended in 1945, most people had never heard of frozen foods. That is vegetables, meats, and fruit juices that were frozen solid and could be kept that way until just before they were consumed — as long as you had the right place to store them and the right equipment to prepare them.
Realize that it was only in the mid- to late 1930s that the electric refrigerator came into widespread use. Before that people had an “ice-box.” That was a well-insulated cabinet — usually wood — with shelves and a compartment at the top or bottom that held a large, solid block of ice that was delivered every day or two by the local ice man. If you wanted small pieces of ice to cool a drink, you chipped them off with an ice pick.
Ice men became more well known, of course, after Eugene O’Neill’s famous 1939 play “The Iceman Cometh.” But the play’s symbolism led to unpleasant connotations about who the “iceman” really was.
After electric refrigerators became commonplace in the late 1930s, it was realized that certain foods could be preserved for extended periods if they were kept frozen solid, not just refrigerated. Although the idea of freezing foods for preservation had been around for a couple of decades, few people had the equipment to keep them that way, and not many were produced for sale. Ice blocks in an old fashion ice box were of no use for this.
Thus not long after the electric refrigerator was born, compartments were soon included that kept things like packages of pre-frozen vegetables frozen solid. Lifestyles for many people changed dramatically. And this was despite the national effort to help the 1940s war effort by making the scrap metals like aluminum contained in refrigerators available for the manufacture of airplanes and other weapons.
I remember our first electric refrigerator in around 1936. It had three ice cube trays in a compartment at the top along with three open metal racks. There were no storage areas to keep frozen items because there were no frozen items to store. Our local markets didn’t carry them. And our refrigerator didn’t have an electric light inside to help you find stuff. Those things came later.
I also remember that keeping beer cold in the new refrigerator was controversial. My older brother and his friends always thought that if you kept beer in the refrigerator too long it got too cold to drink. They were careful how long they kept it there. They thought beer was at its best a little cooler than room temperature. But their reasoning ended when beer companies started to advertise that their beer was better when it was really cold. Score one for General Electric. They made most of the refrigerators then.
It was mainly after the end of World War II that production of consumer goods like refrigerators really took off. And by that time the food industry had realized that selling foods in a package that was frozen was a way to preserve freshness beyond just a few days. No more wilting spinach and moldy string beans. Of course, many still believe that fresh is healthier.
When we moved to West Windsor from Princeton in 1957, our refrigerator was one we had purchased used when we lived in the university student housing project on Harrison Street — the one that is about to be torn down. One of our first important purchases in our new place was a new refrigerator — a really new one. But even then, it did not have much storage space designed just to hold frozen foods. In fact, we rarely used frozen stuff except orange juice. That was a time when nearly everyone began to use frozen orange juice because it was the easiest way to get something that nearly everyone drank each morning.
Orange juice came as a concentrate in a cardboard container with metal ends. “Making” the orange juice was a chore you went through every few days, depending on how many drinkers there were. Opening the container usually involved pulling a wire or plastic band off to release one of the ends. Then the frozen concentrate was spooned into a plastic container where the right amount of cold water was added. The plastic containers were designed just for this purpose, and as time went on new models came into being to make the “juice making” job easier. The final step was giving it a good shake. All this was still considered easier than juicing fresh oranges each morning and disposing of the rinds.
Because so many people had not yet caught on to using frozen foods, most did not have the equipment to store them, such as an upright or chest-type freezer, either in the kitchen or the garage. For some the salvation was in the frozen food lockers that you could rent by the month.
Locally one business that provided rentable frozen food storage lockers was on Alexander Street in Princeton near where Faculty Road now intersects it. It’s now a university building — number 262 — but at one time that’s where many people kept their frozen foods. For a monthly fee you could rent space in an insulated box that was kept in a large refrigerated space below the floor.
There was an electric lifting system on a track above the boxes, and the lift could be positioned over the designated freezer box. When the lift retrieved the desired box it brought it over to the side ramp, where the customer could remove the desired frozen food packages. The push of a button returned the container to its own space in the refrigerated area until next time.
We used that service for a couple of years — until we bought our own freezer to put in the garage, a much easier system. The commercial storage system lasted for quite a few years, but after we stopped using it we tried to forget about it.
With our own freezer handy in the garage we began to rely on prepackaged frozen vegetables as well as ice cream, of course. As for the vegetables, we still cooked them on the stove, since we had not yet ventured into the microwave oven market. For the most part, we used fresh meat and fruit. And when it started to be available, we switched to liquid orange juice in a container. No more “making the orange juice” every few mornings.
But soon there began a public reaction about many things involving what people ate. I think it started in the 1960s when “lifestyle” issues became popular to talk about. Naturally this included “health” and what we were eating. Many people began to question whether or not is was “healthy” to rely so much on frozen foods, regardless of their convenience. Many began to say that “natural” was better, and stopped using frozen foods because they were considered to be “unnatural” — or “non-natural,” if you prefer.
If you decided to go back to “natural” or “fresh” in the kitchen, that meant that preparing meals could take longer. Washing, cutting up, and boiling a pound of fresh string beans takes a lot longer than heating a frozen package in the microwave. And you still have to wash the pot you boiled them in. But some prefer it that way, and they don’t have the used package to throw away and add to the trash chain.
When we had our own vegetable garden a few decades ago, we grew lots of string beans, and we had it both ways. We couldn’t wait in the early summer for the first ones to be big enough to pick and eat fresh. But they kept coming until late in the summer when it was time to start freezing them for use during the winter. That was very satisfying. And we did the same for lima beans, peas, squash, and spinach. We also grew several kinds of lettuce, but that didn’t need cooking and you couldn’t freeze it.
