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On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me a frozen partridge
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On this day in 1886, Clarence Birdseye was born. Clarence Birdseye invented the process and the equipment to quick-freeze foods.
But he started his career collecting hundreds of small mammals to isolate ticks for research. His travels took him to Canada where the indigenous people taught him how to catch fish under thick ice in temperatures reaching 40-degrees below zero. It was then he noticed how fast the fish froze on the surface of the super-cold ice and how fresh the fish tasted when later thawed. The fish was much fresher and had better texture than the frozen fish he remembered in the stinky New York fish markets.
The ice didn’t effect his brain though, because he discovered that quick-freezing formed smaller ice crystals on the food than slow freezing. During slow freezing, bigger ice crystals would damage the cell walls making the food mushy and dehydrated when it thawed.
When Birdseye returned to the States he began developing and patenting quick-freeze machines. Sure, he went bankrupt on his first attempt, but later figured it out and ultimately sold his company and patents to Goldman Sachs for a cool $22 million. And, thus, he never had to pick ticks off rodents again. Goldman Sachs sold it to General Foods who named all their frozen foods after Birdseye whose products can still be found in our freezers today.
It’s Mr. Birdseye’s name that brings us to our Wine Word of the Day: Oeil de Perdrix
Oeil de perdrix is the French name for a Rose’ made in Switzerland. The term translates to “eye of the partridge.” (as in Bird’s eye, get it? I crack myself up!) The name goes back to the middle ages where in France they associated the pale pink color with the eye of a partridge in its death throes. (Lovely, huh? I guess back then they had to kill their own food and couldn’t just go to their grocer’s freezer section of the supermarket. What a hassle!)
In Switzerland the wine is made from Pinot Noir grapes but the most financially successful version was made at the Sutter Home winery in California. There, in 1975, they had produced a white wine from red Zinfandel grapes and named it Oeil de Perdrix. But the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms said they needed to translate the name into English and label wine with a better description. So, they named it White Zinfandel.
Clarence Birdseye (The Life of.)
Books recommended by GrapeStomper Todd at Amazon:
Clarence Birdseye: Frozen Food Innovator (Food Dudes)
American Democracy Versus Prussian Marxism: A Study In The Nature And Results Of Purposive Or Beneficial Government (1920)
The Mammals Of Bitterroot Valley, Montana, In Their Relation To Spotted Fever (1911)
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