Ice, Ice, Baby

  When I was a kid we had two metal ice cube trays that you had to pull the lever on to release the sixteen or so giant cubes. Often someone in the family would unhinge one tray, take three cubes and then put the try back in the freezer with the remaining cubes. That was fine, unless you took a dozen cubes and put the tray back in with just four. I was fairly old before someone go the brilliant idea to put a plastic container in the freezer to dump the whole tray in when you opened it.  
The rule really was, if you used some ice, refill the tray and replace it in the freezer right away. I can’t remember exactly how long they took to freeze, but it was more than four hours. The worst family offense was putting completely empty ice trays back in the freezer. How many times did I go to the freezer on a hot summer day only to discover both trays were empty.
Ice was certainly at a premium back then. We only had two ice trays because that was how many came with the refrigerator. Why did it take us so long to realize you could have as many ice trays as you could fit in your freezer. Of course freezer space was at a premium since all our vegetables and TV dinners had to fit in there.
When we bought our house in Wilton in 1967 my favorite feature of our quirky house was a space aged looking contraption that hung on the mounding between two windows in the kitchen that you used to make crushed ice in. It had a box on the top of a metal tine area with a crank and a red see through plastic rocket shaped cone screwed into the bottom that caught the shaved ice.
It made a lot of noise and was very difficult to crank as you ground those big cubes into a crushed, not quite snow cone, consistency. But whenever we enjoyed a drink with crushed ice it tasted so much better than a cube drink.
My very favorite treat was to get a packet of powder whiskey sour mix from the bar in the little living room and mix it up with a full glass of crushed ice and a little water. Using half a tray of cubes for one drink was a decedent and selfish thing to do.
It is no wonder that I worship the ice maker in my freezer today. It has not been working as well as it used to and I have felt myself falling back to my childhood ice rationing ways. If I ever redo my kitchen I would nothing more than to have a stand alone ice maker. It is amazing how important frozen water is to me.