Henrietta Hay's Column

Reflections while cleaning a refrigerator! Of all the various household chores this is probably the one I enjoy the least. And therefore it gets postponed right up to the point of no return. Eventually, something begins to smell and I have no idea what it is. So I have a choice: continue to postpone the dreaded project or haul everything out and scrub. When the choice gets tipped toward clean, I brace myself and do it. This time it was made much easier by the fact that the alternative was working on the income tax.

I think this is a universal prejudice. I cannot remember ever having heard anyone tell me that she just loved cleaning refrigerators. In fact, at the institution, which shall be nameless, where I used to work there was a small refrigerator and twenty-odd women who were presumably excellent housekeepers. But in that refrigerator things actually grew legs and walked away. Eventually somebody would groan and clean it - whoever drew the short straw. I even have one friend who let this chore go so long that her husband finally got desperate and cleaned the refrigerator himself.

I wonder whether Alexander Fleming left his laboratory and went home for lunch one day back in 1928, only to find his wife cleaning their refrigerator. Aha, he thought, as he looked at the things she was taking out, maybe mold is the answer I have been looking for. And sure enough, penicillin was born. Since this is a mindless chore, reflections are in order. My friend the philosopher, who is not always very subtle, suggested that instead of complaining about it, I might write about it.

Early refrigerators were called iceboxes. They weren't just called that: they were that. If you are my age, you can skip this part because you already know it. The first one I sort of remember, as a kid was a fairly small-insulated cabinet with a space for ice in the top and a shelf or two below. I guess even then they knew that cold air goes down. The iceman did cometh, nearly every day, in the summer at least, and deposits a fifty-pound chunk of ice, which nearly filled the designated space. Or maybe it was a twenty-five pound chunk. When he came, we chased his truck down the street to mooch ice slivers to chew on. If we wanted to chill a drink of anything we did not head for the icemaker or even the ice-cube trays. We chopped whatever we wanted off the big chunk with a device known as an ice pick.

In those days it did not occur to me to wonder where the ice came from. Before icemakers, nature took care of the problem. Natural ice was harvested in the winter and stored. While I may be a little vague about ice in the 1920s, I have it on good authority that the oldest ice formations on earth are those in Antarctica, which are perhaps 50,000,000 years old. That's too new to hold any dinosaurs in the frozen state, but there are some mammoths, bison and other beasties found in polar ice. This, you realize, has nothing whatsoever to do with modern refrigeration. I don't remember when refrigerators became routine kitchen equipment, but it was a long time after they were invented. According to one of my handy dandy reference books, the first ice-making machine was invented in 1850. And many years later Clarence Birdseye figured out what to do with one and invented frozen food. Little did he know that he was starting a whole industry, which would save many non-cooks from starvation.

Probably my mother did not have my problems with very occasional cleaning of refrigerators. She was an immaculate housekeeper, and probably scrubbed it out every day. I obviously did not inherit that particular gene and try as she might; she never convinced me that housekeeping was something all young ladies must learn. I had a great excuse. Kin Hubbard, an early day newspaper humorist said, "I never saw an athletic girl that thought she was strong enough to do indoor work."

Until someone invents a refrigerator, which is not only frost-free, but also messy-free and odor-free, I guess we will have to continue with the odious chore of emptying and scrubbing the things from time to time. Oh yes, it's clean, and I can quit reflecting.