What’s in your freezer? Gone are the times when most individuals’s fridges had solely ice cubes and perhaps some ice cream. These days, most of our fridges comprise packets of our favorite frozen meals that style scrumptious and could be ready shortly. Many individuals deep fry these snacks or use an air fryer, usually within the evenings, for making fast and engaging frozen snacks like French fries, pizzas, rooster nuggets, potato wedges, bao buns, momos, burger patties samosas, kebabs and so forth. However have you ever ever considered who got here up with this concept of frozen meals and the way had been these invented? Let’s dive into the attention-grabbing historical past of the invention of frozen meals.
Historic Strategies Of Preserving Meals By Freezing
In response to Recent From The Freezer, the thought of freezing meals for preservation dates again so far as 3,000 BC. The traditional Chinese language used to protect meals by means of the chilly winter utilizing ice cellars. The traditional Romans saved provides in underground chambers crammed with ice and snow.
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Inspiration For The Fashionable Frozen Meals
The fashionable method of freezing meals has been round for the reason that twentieth century, developed by Clarence Birdseye. In response to Britannica, Birdseye went to Labrador, Canada, in 1912, the place he took up work as a fur dealer.
In response to Frozen Meals Europe journal, Clarence Birdseye noticed how the folks in Labrador froze recent fish and meat shortly within the Arctic temperatures. The locals had found that freezing the fish this manner saved it at its peak high quality and locked in its freshness. This helped them protect the fish, which was needed due to the problem of acquiring recent meals within the winter. This resolution spurred Birdseye’s creativeness to invent packaged frozen meals.
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How Birdseye Invented Frozen Meals For Retailing
Birdseye returned to the US, experimented with the freezing course of and found the best way to freeze meals with out damaging the meals’s cells in order that it nonetheless tastes recent and scrumptious after defrosting.
In response to the ‘Handbook of Frozen Meals‘ as shared by Eater, Birdseye positioned meals between two metallic plates at -13 levels Fahrenheit in opposition to a low convection tunnel to flash-freeze the product.
Britannica provides that although his weren’t the primary frozen meals, Birdseye’s freezing course of was extremely environment friendly and preserved the unique style of a wide range of meals.
Precisely 100 years in the past, in 1924, Birdseye helped discovered Basic Seafoods Firm. He then started efficiently promoting quick-frozen meals that made him rich.
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Rise Of Frozen Meals Consumption In The US
The unique, flash-frozen meals included haddock fillets, 17 different cuts of meat and fish, spinach, loganberries and raspberries, shares Eater. The corporate marketed June peas “as gloriously inexperienced as any you will note subsequent summer season.”
By World Battle II (1939 to 1945), canned items had been despatched to troopers abroad and People had been inspired to purchase frozen meals. Publish-war, between 1945 and 1946, People purchased 800 million kilos of frozen meals, Mark Kurlansky writes in Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man, shares Eater. By 1954, with the invention of the fish stick and the 98-cent TV dinner, frozen meals turned an American staple.
