Grasse and the ice trade

Long before modern refrigeration was introduced, there was a thriving trade in natural ice across Europe and beyond. In rich households, winter ice was stored and used to preserve perishable foods, to chill fruit and wine, to make ice cream and even by doctors to treat inflammation. Over the centuries, manor houses, Roman villas and chateaux had ice-houses.

Entrance to an ice-house in the grounds of an English country house

They were hidden in cellars or in adjacent woodland, and stored ice, usually with straw as insulation, through the summer months.

For most of European history, the ice was harvested from local ponds, lakes and caves during the winter, close to where it was to be stored and consumed. But from the early nineteenth century, a thriving long distance trade in ice developed. The UK, and especially London, imported ice from Norway which was much purer than local supplies.

In the USA, an ‘Ice-King’ named Frederic Tudor began supplying ice from the lakes of New England to the ‘sugar barons’ of the Caribbean from about 1805 onwards. Later he had many customers in the plantation states of the South. By 1830, he was even supplying American ice to the British in India!

A commemorative marker for the Tudor Ice Company at Fresh Pond, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Ice around the Mediterranean

Wealthy households in France, Spain and Italy had the same demand as their peers elsewhere, and ice houses were common. The adjacent mountains of the Alps, Pyrenees, Apennines and Dolomites generated plenty of high quality winter ice which could be brought down from the hills in the early spring for storage and use over the summer.

Ice-house in the gardens of Domaine du Saint Jacques du Couloubrier

Grasse was no exception. You can see an ice-house locally today in the extensive gardens of the Domaine du Couloubier in Saint Jacques.

But Grasse had an industrial need of its own for ice.

The town’s predominant method of scent extraction before 1870 was ‘cold enfleurage’, in which wood and glass plates known as 'chassis' are smeared with a layer of fat into which petals are repeatedly placed so that their scent diffuses into it. The result is called a ‘pommade’. When the pommade is washed in alcohol, the fat separates out leaving a thick liquid known as an absolute, which contains the scent. The problem is that the absolute still contains some materials, known as ‘cires’ (‘waxes’) which are not soluble in alcohol. To produce a clear liquid, without cloudiness and suitable for perfume, these have to be removed by chilling and filtering the liquid.

Cold enfleurage in progress in the Lautier perfumery

Since there was no such thing as refrigeration, the chilling part of the process, known as ‘glaçage’ (something like ‘icing’), required natural ice. Salt was added to ice from the mountains to reduce the freezing point and create a brine in which the temperature reached -10°C or lower. Then containers of pommade mixed with alcohol were placed in freezing brine baths to precipitate out the waxes. Not a very pleasant process for the workers involved!

A room in the Musée International de la Parfumerie (MIP). In the corner, chassis for cold enfleurage are stacked (in the left hand of the two photos, a worker is using a spatula to take pommade from a chassis). To the left is a churn used to mix the pommade with alcohol. The other vessels were placed in the brine solution to cool the mixture and extract the 'cires' ('waxes').

Sources of ice

You don’t have to travel far from Grasse to reach mountains where winters are cold, long and generate plenty of ice and snow. In the higher valleys above St Vallier-de-Thiey, you can still see some of the places from where Grasse’s ice came. Some were little more than natural water-filled caves and crevasses, but others were carefully constructed stone-lined pits dug into the rock and covered with earth and stones.

Near the tiny hamlet of La Moulière, close to the Audibergue ski station, is a cave known as Aven de la Glacière, from which ice was extracted (photo Groupe Spéléologique de Vence)

Workers packed snow and ice into these ‘glacières’, layering it with insulating plant material, ready for harvesting after the winter.

A constructed glacière. This one is the Glacière du Pic de Bertagne, in the Saint-Baume massif above Saint-Maximin in the Var. (Image ©Département des Bouches-du-Rhône)

The ice was transported on muleback by night, arriving at factory and domestic ice-houses and cellars around dawn.

There were other facilities nearby. Between Grasse and St Vallier lies Bastide d'Arbouin, where there are the remains of a ‘freezing basin’, in which water gathered and froze during the winter. In the spring, the ice was harvested and stacked, insulated with straw, in an adjacent partially underground glacière, from which it could be transported to customers. Given the location’s proximity to Grasse, it was probably a lucrative additional source of the revenue for the Bastide.

Ice house (above) at the Bastide d'Arbouin, Saint Vallier de Thiey (Ministère de la Culture photos). Ice houses were not designed for appearance (!), and most of the capacity was underground. The 'freezing basin' is shown in the lower picture.

It’s possible that Grasse’s factories purchased ice from as far away as the Jura. An ice harvesting facility like those of Frederic Tudor in New England was first set up on the Lac de Sylans, about 50km west of Geneva, in 1865. In 1882 a new railway was routed nearby which linked to the PLM (Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée) system. Driven by demand from the fishing industry, ice from the lake was shipped to Marseille and the Mediterranean coast. Some may have been sent to Grasse.

The use of natural ice died out in Grasse with the arrival of refrigeration, and the factories no longer needed to store ice through the summer, so the old glacières would have been re-purposed. But in the records of the Ministry of Culture about the Hugues-Guezet perfumery at 12 av Chiris (now apartments), there is a reference to one.

12 Av Chiris: once the Hugues-Guezet perfumery

As one of Grasse’s smaller factories, it may be that cold enfleurage remained in use there after large concerns like Chiris had moved on to the new technologies.

Ice is resilient and bulk ice melts slowly

Moving ice around is not actually as difficult as it sounds, and ice in blocks melts surprisingly slowly. Frederic Tudor, who was almost certainly the longest distance supplier of ice, developed insulation methods aboard ship using wood and straw which meant that only one third of his cargoes were lost even on the eight month journey around the Cape of Good Hope – under sail, of course – from New England to Calcutta.

Ice being transferred from a ship in Mumbai (Bombay) as late as 1889.

And during World War II, there was a proposal known as ‘Project Habakkuk’ to develop ships made of ice and wood pulp as unsinkable aircraft carriers. In a diary entry, Field Marshall Alan Brooke, the then head of the British Army, describes how the well-born but rather stupid Lord Louis Mountbatten fired his revolver at a special block of ice, narrowly missing various very senior officers when the bullet ricocheted around the room.

The arrival of refrigeration

Enfleurage, whether cold (for jasmine and tuberose) or hot, was labour intensive and by its nature low volume. The introduction of extraction via solvents, which was part of Grasse’s ‘industrial revolution’ of the later nineteenth century, allowed huge increases in volume and slowly rendered cold enfleurage out of date. But it didn’t eliminate the need for cooling.

The use of solvents produced extracted materials known as ‘concrete’ rather than cold enfleurage’s pommades, but they still contained anything up to 50% of ‘waxes’, so glaçage was still a key part of the process to generate the pure and clear ‘absolute’ liquids needed for perfumes.

Fortunately for the Grassois perfumers, the availability of modern solvents, mostly from the new German chemical plants, coincided with the introduction of a new refrigeration process developed in France. In 1859, a Frenchman named Ferdinand Carré patented a continuously running machine which used ammonia as the refrigerant.

Cover page of a manual produced for the US rights-holders for the Carré-Mignon & Rouart machine. It claims to be 'the only industry producing a necessity for which the raw material costs nothing'!

He exhibited at the Great London Exposition in 1862 and created a sensation by producing 200 kilograms of ice per hour. In Grasse, from 1870 onwards, machines based on Carré’s principle and made by a company named Mignon & Rouart began to be introduced to cool the pommade and later the concrete alcohol mixtures. They eliminated the need to purchase and store natural ice.

Ironically, Jean-Baptiste Mignon, an industrialist who started from nothing, built one of the largest ice-houses in France at his estate near Limoges, now known as the Château de Valmate or Walmath.

By the early twentieth century, the refrigeration processes originated by Carré, Mignon, Carl von Linde and others had forced the ice trade in Grasse and around Europe into oblivion.