How the freezer came in from the COLD

It’s been out of fashion since the 1970s. But thanks to a boom in fancy frozen food, it’s 2019’s coolest trend

It used to be that the freezer was the least glamorous kitchen appliance, shunned for the hot, hot, hot excitement of a six-burner stove, ignored in favour of a glossy stand mixer in this season’s colour, or the phwoar-look-at-the-motor-on-that thrust of a Vitamix blender.

In contrast, the chilly domestic workhorse was sold to us with cheery, slightly weary housewifely entreaties such as, ‘Mum’s gone to Iceland!’.

In my own childhood in the seventies, though my father worked in a factory that made domestic appliances, he had a slightly eccentric attitude to convenience, which meant we had neither a dishwasher nor a freezer for years.

I went to friends’ houses for tea and marvelled as special delicacies such as potato waffles, Chicken Kievs and mini cheesecakes came out of cavernous chest freezers like treasures from a vault.

As soon as I had my own flat, I began my lifelong love affair with my own freezer. this was the early 1990s, so I thought I was very smart freezing slices of lemon with water in ice cube trays for speedy gin and tonics.

In fact, ice cube trays figured strongly in my freezer game. Leftover wine for sauces, fiercely reduced stock, chopped herbs in water, olive oil or butter, and tomato puree bought cheaply in tins and portioned out into casserole-ready quantities — into the ice cube trays they all went.

I even remember making, inspired by a recipe in a Jane Asher cookbook, elaborate frozen bowls with flowers and herbs encased in the ice, for serving I can’t really remember what. to be honest, the bowl seemed to be the whole point.

Like so many happy pairings though, all of us settled down into gentle, unthrilling companionship with our freezers, eventually taking them for granted as convenient but unglamorous repositories for fish fingers and frozen peas.

until now. For our chilly friends are having their moment, if not in the sun, then at least in the most elegant shade. As we get busier and busier, frozen food grows in popularity. the latest figures show that the frozen food market in the UK in 2018 was worth a hefty £6.2 billion, a 4.8 per cent increase on the previous year and, according to the British Frozen Food Federation, it is the fastest-growing retail category.

TO put this in context, we spent £ 74 million more on ice cream last year alone (an increase of 13.2 per cent on the previous year) — and I promise that wasn’t just me!

Frozen food is no longer seen as second best, something for emergencies or a poor alternative to a take-away. We increasingly appreciate its benefits: it’s often cheaper, especially for soft fruits, and fruits and vegetables retain more of their nutritional power, compared to fresh stuff that may have been sitting around on the supermarket shelf for a bit.

It’s convenient, in that you can use just as much as you need, and cuts down on chopping and peeling, a particular boon for elderly people or those with disabilities.

personally, I love the frozen smoothie mixes that mean in a matter of seconds, I can throw together something relatively healthy first thing in the morning. And also frozen spinach because, frankly, who has a pan large enough to cook fresh spinach?

A pillow-full shrinks so much it makes just about enough to feed an abstemious mouse. And as we become more conscious of cutting down on waste, our freezers are our best weapons. WRAP ( Waste and Resources Action programme) says we throw away up to a quarter of the food we buy, with each UK household tossing away the equivalent of eight meals a week.

In 2015, we ditched 7.1 million tonnes of household food, worth £18 billion. of course, part of the answer is buying less, but another part is definitely freezing more.

today, I have a fridge freezer with two big freezer drawers in the bottom, like a filing cabinet of deliciousness. I always have grated cheese for gratins and sauces (the perfect fate for those slightly dried out ends of wedges no longer fit for the cheeseboard), rinds of parmesan for simmering in minestrones, breadcrumbs (I never waste a slightly stale loaf), egg whites, chicken carcasses and other bones waiting until I have time to make stock, clean veg peelings and trimmings, also for stock, and of course the stock itself.

there is always frozen all-butter pastry, for making clear-out-odds-and-ends-from-the-fridge pies and tarts, which are often the most delicious.

I do now — though it has taken me years to learn — obsessively label things. Yes, and I can tell you this because we’re friends, I was that idiot who always thought I would remember what was in the bag or box and had to find out the hard way that white sauce, horseradish and brandy butter can look remarkably similar.

I also keep a fairly small freezer to ensure I cycle through its contents at a fair lick. I have a friend who, on eating roast grouse at her mother’s house and commenting on how good it was, was a little put off her dinner when told her father had shot them. He had been dead for ten years at that point.

I find increasingly I don’t freeze whole meals very much. I am not catering for a horde of hungry kids each evening, so I don’t labour under that kind of pressure.

I concur with Queen Nigella who, in her iconic book How to eat, wrote: ‘the freezer can easily become a culinary graveyard, a place where good food goes to die’.

I find that the freezer can — if you’re not incredibly vigilant — become procrastination central, the waiting room for the bin. sometimes things stay in the fridge for a few days and I don’t really fancy them so I demote them to the freezer, where they will languish like Ötzi the Ice Man, who in 1991 was found on the Austrian-Italian border, where he had been entombed in a glacier for 5,300 years.

Nigella also advocates using your freezer a bit like a shop, a chilly deli of mouth-watering possibilities. there has certainly never been a better time to posh-up your freezer game.

PICARD, the French frozen food company known by some as Waitrose on Ice, is now available via ocado, and it’s a festival of gougères, mini croque monsieurs, garlic snails and Breton oysters with apple vinaigrette, as well as all manner of gratins and confits, fondants and tatins.

For me, I love their tiny pearl onions, artichoke bottoms and chopped tomatoes, all ready to chuck into stews without any fiddly peeling and prepping.

then, of course, there is Waitrose, the mothership of middle- class convenience. Its Cooks’ Ingredients frozen range is like having your own kitchen porter to do all of the boring stuff.

Its chopped garlic, parsley, jalapeno chillies and ginger, diced onions and shallots, and soffritto mix of carrots, onions and celery have often got me to the finish line of dinner, where the only thing that’s broken a sweat is the onions.

then there’s Cook — the shops and also online. It specialises in ‘homemade’ food good enough to fool the most pernickety domestic science teacher, or mother-in-law who thinks she’s a domestic science teacher.

It sells lots of homely pies, bakes and casseroles, and party dishes for eight such as fish pie and lasagnes, which you can buy in rustic ceramic dishes if you really want to pass them off as your own.

even Iceland these days isn’t what it was. Come for the Greggs steak bakes, stay for the scallops, lobster tails and tempura prawns…

And in these uncertain political times, there is something enormously comforting in knowing that whatever happens, there will be a freezer full of gourmet fish pie, gyoza pot stickers and tanzanian chocolate ice cream with blood orange sorbet to see me through, or at least exchange for firewood or fresh water should the need arise.