A Snowman in the Freezer

I wrote about my grandma’s fridge and freezer a few years ago in my book, Life’s a Beach, when I was celebrating National Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day (November 15th).

My grandma’s fridge was legendary. By legendary, I mean revolting. For some reason, she saw it as my calling to be the one to clean out her fridge and food cupboards when I visited.

The problem was that she didn’t trust me with the contents of her fridge, and so sat next to me in a supervisory role, telling me, as I tried to dispose of 30-year-old jars of piccalilli, that it was perfectly fine and that she had planned to use it that very evening.

I was rarely allowed to throw anything out. Occasionally, for plates of food, or bowls of unidentified matter that had developed their own biodiversity, I had to distract her by pointing to something on the other side of the room, before slipping the offending item into the bin.

The only thing worse than my grandma’s fridge, was my grandma’s freezer. She had an obscenely large chest freezer. The type usually used to hide dead bodies in horror films. There was no risk of finding a dead body in her freezer, however, as every inch of space was filled. Not all with food, though. Mostly with ice.

The freezer was fairly old and had clearly not been defrosted since the day it was bought. The ice was so thick around the sides that it almost met in the middle, resulting in a post-box sized gap through which my grandma deposited food. The frost wasn’t as bad towards the bottom of the freezer so there was an area where food had accumulated over the years. Once food had been posted through this hole, there was no way of ever getting it back.

No job will ever compare to the defrosting of that freezer - a job that was assigned to me on one particular visit. It is a day I will remember for the rest of my life.

I genuinely had to use a hammer and chisel to break through the top crust, and then a shovel to remove the vast quantities of ice inside the freezer. At the very bottom I found all sorts of obscure items; there was a huge number of prawns - loose - just scattered amongst the other things. There were mussels, individual sausages, random lumps of meat, peas. It was like she had tipped in the contents of a giant paella dish. Come to think of it, she probably had. I also found two pigs’ trotters, just sitting neatly at the bottom next to a bag of chips.

‘Oh, good. I’d been wondering where those had got to,’ she said when I tried to throw them out.

‘Wondering since 1983?’ I muttered.

But the random food was not the most extraordinary thing in that freezer. It was the pillars of bowls, and empty ice cream containers, that my grandma had filled with stock, stewed fruit, or sauces and then put directly into the freezer, in the uncovered bowl, directly on top of the previous container that had been placed there. Because of the small gap which they had been passed through, these bowls and containers were not stacked level and the contents of each vessel had spilled out over the sides before it had a chance to freeze properly. It is no exaggeration to say there were at least 30 different containers stacked in several rickety frozen towers. The contents were completely unidentifiable. I’m sure when she placed them in the freezer, she assumed she would remember what each was, but the reality was that even if she had been able to retrieve them from the depths, through the tiny post-box sized hole, they all just looked like brown mush once frozen anyway.

‘I think we can throw out most of these,’ I said. ‘You must be running short of bowls and containers with all of these in here.’

‘Don’t be silly. We can’t get rid of those. Those stocks are delicious. If you just stack them as neatly as you can, I will use them all.’

‘Ok then,’ I said, despairingly.

‘Keep a couple of them out. I’ll use them for dinner tonight.’

‘Which ones? They all look the same.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll be able to work out what they are when I have a proper look.’

This was a lie. She cooked a delicious roast chicken with vegetables for dinner, but, what she thought was gravy, turned out to be stewed gooseberries, although it actually worked surprisingly well.

She served ice cream for pudding, but I declined the offer of fish stock as an accompaniment.

Today was National Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day. The day was created to encourage people to sort out their fridges; to get back into the depths of their shelves and drawers and see what scary items lurk there. After all of the experiences of my grandma’s fridge and freezer, nothing scares me anymore.

I pulled out the drawers of ours and found a few offending items: a cucumber that had turned to water, a bunch of celery that was so wilted that it couldn’t stand upright, a yoghurt that had leaked and stuck itself to the back of the fridge like a limpet, and a jar of strawberry jam with a luxurious blanket of furry mould on top. Most of the jars were past their best before date, but they all looked perfectly edible, so I didn’t throw too much out.

I then decided to see how bad the freezer was. There were no pigs’ trotters, but there were plenty of loose items in the bottom of the drawer, and four pots of stock/gravy/stewed fruit were stacked on one of the shelves. I was certain when I put them in there that I would remember what they were but looking at the containers of brown mush I had absolutely no idea. There was no getting away from it; I was turning into my grandma.

Things got a lot worse in our freezer before they got better.