Didn't know until this week that the whole frozen food business starts with a man standing on ice in Labrador watching fish come up through a hole and go stiff in the wind before anybody could blink. Forty below will do that. Months later they'd cook up and still taste like fish, not like sad wet cardboard, and he wanted to know why.
It's speed. Freeze a pea slowly and the water inside it takes its time making big ugly crystals that shred the cell walls, so when you thaw it you get a grey mush and a puddle. I've done it to a whole tray of garden peas in a freezer that couldn't keep up, and the puddle was unforgivable. Fast freezing makes crystals too small to do the damage. Anyway, he died in 1956, and I think about him every time I open a bag of peas that are still round.
The patent that matters is the double belt freezer — packaged food squeezed between two metal belts chilled with brine, so the cold goes in from both faces at once. First retail test was in Springfield, Massachusetts, about 1930, in a handful of shops, with the freezer cabinets lent out because nobody owned one.
He wasn't out there to invent anything, Rosa — he was trading fox pelts and doing fisheries work, and the fish froze on their own in the wind. At forty below a fish out of the water goes solid in a minute or two, right through, which is more or less what a blast freezer does now with a lot more machinery.