The icebox

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I've heard some elderly people refer to the refrigerator as the "icebox". It sounds so funny.

that's what they used to be.


cold is a pretty ancient but proven way of preserving foods (or mummifying bodies), as is salting.

I grew up calling them that.Many people in the South still do.Now I call it the "friggerater."

When I was a kid I saw a Family Circus cartoon where Dolly is carrying a bowl of some kind of food and saying to the mother "Grandma told me to put this in the ice box. What's an ice box?"

Ha ha, that's not nearly as bad as kids asking "what's a typewriter?"

But yes, that's what refrigerators were commonly called back in the early 20th century. They were non-mechanical and you had to put ice in them, which melted slowly because of the insulation inside the hollow walls of the box. Eventually you had to replace the ice, which you usually got from an iceman. I guess in the summer the iceman had to go up to the North Pole to get the ice... nah.

I always thought the "icebox" to be the portable coolers used to keep your beverages cold on a journey.

fridge or freezer for me. never called it "icebox." I guess i'm not of the proper generation for that. there useta be an actual job, called an "iceman" whose job was it to deliver blocks of ice for people's iceboxes.

I heard my mum call the fridge the icebox once. I asked her what an icebox was. She told me about the icebox. Than I became fascinated with them like I do all old things.

My grandma calls it that sometimes.

I grew up hearing my parents calling it that.

Weezer - Say It Ain't So

I looked up icebox on Wiki and they showed some pictures of them. One was made of oak and looked more like a fancy stand-alone cupboard then something for keeping food cold. I think a lot people still called them the icebox for years even after mechanical refrigerators were made because they were used to the original name.

I think coolers used for camping and picnics must be the modern version of an icebox. I read iceboxes were also called a cold closet, which sounds even funnier.