The Old Family Freezer Was a Treasure Chest

We ate fish sticks on Fridays.

But we weren’t Catholic, and it wasn’t every Friday. We even ate them on an occasional Tuesday or any day for that matter. Fish sticks were cheap and acceptable to us kids. They were also easy to prepare as long as Mom didn’t forget about them in the oven where they turned into small bricks.

Fish sticks, TV dinners and frozen vegetables were just the beginning of our nation’s migration to foods of convenience back in the 1950s and 1960s. And with all these new options came the need for much more freezer space.

I think our old fridge was a General Electric. The door comprised the whole front so every time it was opened it the freezer was exposed. The freezer had only enough room for a couple tins of Mom’s homemade cookies, a few tinfoil-wrapped leftovers and two metal ice cube trays that were always empty when I needed ice. I’m pretty sure I know which of my brothers did that but I’m not saying who so that they’ll always wonder.

You couldn’t add a frozen pizza without rearranging everything. It was not a self-defrosting freezer so if you didn’t regularly scrape out the encroaching glacier of frost, you’d have to unplug it and thaw it out just to find anything. I’m pretty sure it was the fridge that ended up at the cabin, serving our more limited needs there for many years.

Go Big and Stay Home

Indeed, if you were serious about having large cuts of beef and pork (and a five-quart pail of ice cream) ready anytime, you needed a chest freezer. It became imperative for large families like ours.

The day the new Frigidaire chest freezer arrived (from the Farmer Store I think) was one for the family history book. It took up a whole wall in our enclosed back porch right off the kitchen and it changed everything. I remember Mom smiling a lot. It seems sexist now that my mom did almost everything having to do with food in those days. But it was her domain and she relished it.

The freezer could store half a beef, loads of pork and a dozen chickens. There was room for venison and trout. Mom could freeze blanched corn, rhubarb, freezer jam, bread, coffee cans full of smelt and, yes, frozen pizza. Now she could buy or prepare food in bulk and freeze it.

At some point clear freezer bags, freezer tape and felt pens helped us identify various stored items. But there were always some orphan packages, avoided because they had no marking. These ended up buried in the deepest parts of the freezer abyss, off in the corners, untouched for years and slowly dying from freezer burn.

With the advent of the microwave oven, Mom could always find something to thaw for supper, even the mystery stuff which sometimes was revealed to be just some scraps for the dog. The worst were the Christmas tins that would normally contain cookies or bars. If they weren’t marked, you had to open them to identify the contents. They were always hard to open but when frozen, you also ran the risk of frostbite. And after all that work the contents might just be a partial bag of shredded coconut or crushed walnuts.

The Workbench

A bonus with a chest freezer is that the top can serve as a lightweight workbench (emphasis on the lightweight part). You couldn’t lean or sit on it. It was a place to throw our coats and hats while we removed our boots and after playing in the snow. Mom used it to lay out her utensils whenever she made doughnuts.

When we were really hot, such as after mowing the yard, we’d stick our sweaty heads into the freezer as far as we could and breathe deeply. It was very therapeutic, even though Mom hollered at us.

That freezer lasted for years, even surviving a couple lengthy power outage scares, the greatest worry with a large freezer. My brother Warren inherited it. At one point it stored a four-foot musky a nephew caught. It also seasonally stored trimmings from many deer until it could be ground into burger, brats, and sausage.

Catherine’s family had an upright freezer. They don’t store as much as a chest freezer and take more effort to organize things, in my opinion. Catherine’s mom couldn’t resist regularly buying more without first using up some of the existing contents. It was so overloaded they could never find anything.

It had shelves but you often couldn’t find them. Just opening the door was dangerous. Your toes could get crushed by a five-pound brick-hard roast. One unlabeled item, discovered after many years, was the petrified top of our wedding cake, usually preserved for a one-year anniversary celebration. There was also at least one half-empty ice cream container with a “protective ice coating” over its contents.

I’ve had chest freezers in my own homes, downsizing now to a much smaller one. It’s much more efficient. But some things are the same. We still have some unmarked items in there that are prime candidates for freezer burn.

There are also a few unmarked Christmas tins.