Victorian cocktails: Wenham Lake ice

This week we thought we’d take a look through some of our other antique family books — two copies of the famous Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, one edition from 1893, the other from 1906. Two copies might seem excessive, but the later one has a lot more in it, as you can see from their relative sizes!

While having a look at what Mrs Beeton did with gin, we found an intriguing ingredient: Wenham Lake ice. After some research, we discovered that Lake Wenham is a lake in Massachusetts which was famously pure and was the source of a huge industry in ice harvesting.

In the days before cheap electricity, it wasn’t really feasible to make ice, so it was saved during the cold months and carefully insulated until needed. The US was reputed to have the best ice, and when Wenham lake ice became Queen Victoria’s favourite, its popularity was assured. Some Norwegians even renamed one of their lakes Wenham Lake for a while so that they could sell their ice with that name!

It’s amazing to think of ice being collected, sent by train to Boston, shipped across the Atlantic and brought into homes across Britain to be used in cocktails. The cocktail recipes in the 1893 edition call for Wenham Lake ice, but by 1906 this has been replaced by the rather more prosaic “crushed ice” - either the fashion or the economy of shipping ice from Massachusetts must have changed!