As Weird as It Sounds, Our Freezers Hold Our Memories
They’re a portal to the past
Dust blanketed the unfinished part of the basement in the row house where I grew up in Philadelphia, not far from the Liberty Bell. Luggage, old cookie tins, and my father’s workbench languished in a room my siblings and I avoided. We wouldn’t go down there except for games of hide-and-seek — or when a parent sent us down there to dig through the freezer for dinner.
That 28-inch Whirlpool freezer, which, like me, is vintage 1980s, brimmed with a visual cacophony of whole chickens, bags of matzo balls, and soup-filled Tupperware containers stacked on shelves. A wire basket of baked goods held bialys from family trips to New York, half loaves of sun-dried tomato bread, and before my mother died, hunks of leftover cake she baked for holidays, birthdays, or sometimes, “just because.” We could have easily survived nuclear armageddon for weeks, feasting on all of this, along with frozen, homemade lasagna.
Standalone home freezers came onto the American market in the 1920s, according to The Oxford Companion to Food. But freezers weren’t widely seen in American homes until after the Second World War, when prices dropped and the breadth of frozen foods expanded, which included Swanson TV dinners introduced in 1953.
