Cold Things and Drinks

Ice came to the Philippines in the mid-nineteenth century, giant blocks of it carved out of frozen Wenham Lake in Massachusetts, famous at the time as supposedly the purest ice in the world, as clear as glass. Before that, drinks were cooled in earthen jars, to redress the heat of the climate. By the turn of the twentieth century, as chronicled by the historian Ambeth R. Ocampo, Filipinos were clamoring for ice, which was buried in rice husks to keep it cold and sold from horse-drawn carts. (Refrigerators arrived in the 1920s, too expensive for any but the rich, and only became widely available after World War II.) As with so many imports from abroad, we’ve embraced ice as our own, turning it into the foundation of one of our favorite desserts, Halo-Halo. And every drink, even a soda taken straight from the fridge, gets poured into a glass with a stack of ice cubes—although we do make an exception for a few hot drinks, above all Tsokolate.