Fridge doors and fridge evolution

BEFORE AND AFTER

my-fridge

my-fridge-2

My fridge door has been making increasingly creaking, crunching noises as it is opened and closed. So today for the second time my very handy husband took it off and fixed it. Last time I didn't listen to him and reloaded the very capacious shelves in the door with jars of this and that. He tried to point out that the door could not withstand the weight and I was ruining the hinges, but I refused to believe him. My reasoning was, why provide the shelves if you couldn't put what you wanted on them - and the obvious use for them is all those little jars of stuff you have lurking in the fridge. Anyway - I have now listened to him and rearranged my fridge - not to my liking I might say - with mostly lighter items, like bread, in the fridge door. We'll see how it goes and whether I can bear to keep shuffling through jars on the fridge shelves.

But it got me to thinking how fridges have changed over the years.

Well - my grandmother didn't have a fridge. Not in the house I remember anyway. She had a wire fronted little cupboard outside the kitchen door in a sort of lean-to, in which she kept butter and she kept her milk in a bucket of cold water when it was hot. I don't really remember the kitchen in my first house, but in the second one we had a very large stone walled pantry in which things were kept cool. But we also had a tiny fridge - a bit like the one below I think. It certainly had a top on which things were put. I'm guessing only the essentials like milk and cream and butter were kept in it. Not much room for anything else. And I don't remember my mother migrating to anything bigger, but maybe she did.

Skipping to the first flat we rented when we were first married - it was furnished and therefore had a fridge. But it too was no bigger than the one above and the top was my only work space. But I can't say I remember feeling that I needed a bigger fridge. A bigger workspace - yes. It was England though - doesn't get all that hot there and there's not a lot of room.

Then we came to Australia and we had to buy a fridge. I can remember scoffing at the huge fridges of the Australians and claiming that they only kept beer in it and since we weren't going to drink a lot of beer we didn't need a big one. But basically you couldn't get a small one, and so we ended up with a two-door fridge/freezer (my family had never had a freezer - just a compartment for ice blocks). The freezer section was at the top and was not all that big - but it was big enough to accommodate a side of lamb. You can't get them any more either. When we first came here you could buy a whole side of lamb at a price of 16c a kilo! I don't think you can buy any bit of lamb for less than $10 a kilo now and you certainly can't buy a whole side. Back then even supermarkets sold sides of lamb. Our first flat was not very big and the fridge was mostly in the lounge part of the open-plan kitchen/lounge. Not aesthetically pleasing, but bought with our future house in mind.

But I digress. Back to fridges. The other thing I remember is being told by a Hungarian immigrant friend, that you had to store apples and oranges in the fridge as they tasted so much better. I'm guessing that the gourmets would disagree, but I have certainly developed a taste for eating my apples and oranges cold from the fridge. And in the summer fruit (and vegetables) would go off pretty quickly if it wasn't in the fridge.

Gradually, of course, we grew to need a larger fridge, though I'm not quite sure what we would have stored in it that needed so much room. Because I don't remember having that many jars that needed refrigerating back then. All those apples and oranges perhaps. And we also bought a separate freezer to accommodate the meat that we bought in bulk and froze. And the ice cream and the icy poles. It wasn't that large, but the small freezer compartment at the top had become insufficient.

Then we moved back to Melbourne and into this house and the kitchen had no room for our fridge and our freezer. We remodelled the kitchen but even so there was not enough room and so we sold our old fridge and freezer and ventured into the two-door side by side type. (Should have kept the fridge for use as a drinks fridge in the carport!) I think the one we have now is the second or third iteration of the two-door fridge/freezer side by side - and always bought to fit the space rather than for any other reason. And our first one did not have any shelves in the door. I remember being jealous of friends and sons who had these. I was delighted when we got our current model with all the shelves in the door - now I could put all those little jars there and they would be to hand when needed. But it hasn't worked. I have destroyed the hinges, so it's back to climbing over things on the shelf. And the whole thing is really not big enough. Christmas and dinner parties and the day after a trip to the market are nightmares. Where to put everything? Though I think I have become a bit of a star at reshuffling things and storing stuff. And there's always the other fridge up in the Gatehouse (our 'granny flat'. But it's a pain to have to go all the way there.

So maybe the time has come to yet again investigate a new fridge. It too would have to fit the available space though. Nowadays fridges have two new features - the freezer on the bottom with drawers, and two opening doors on the wider fridge top section.

Oh and until you find that you need a fridge with a leftwards opening door you don't realise how few companies make fridges with doors that open to the left. There was a time when you could choose which way to open the door. No more it seems.

And how did we get to the position that a fridge (and freezer) is absolutely essential? It has taken a mere seventy years to get from no fridge (I'm talking about for ordinary people here - not for the rich or the commercial use) to huge fridge/freezers with 'French' doors and plumbed in iced water and computers on the front. We won't be getting the plumbed in chilled water though - takes up far too much of the valuable interior space. You can even get fridges with screens on them to see what's inside.

How did everyone manage for all of the hundreds of years before the 50s? I guess they just had food that went off or they didn't store food for long, or they preserved their food in different ways - smoking, drying, pickling, etc. So they would have spent more time doing all those preserving things as well as shopping, because if they couldn't store stuff then they would have to buy more frequently.

So it's churlish to complain about having so much choice, and something not functioning quite as it should. I'm being terribly spoilt and middle-class. What a thing to worry about when most of the world is actually starving.