51ºÚÁÏ

Apparently, my refrigerator finally read some of the mean things I have been writing about it, and decided to give up the appliance ghost.

But it was sneaky about it. It didn’t conk out suddenly and definitively. It was more insidious than that.

It started to lose its cool.

Refrigerated items should be kept around 40 degrees. But in my fridge, things began to feel less chilly than they should. I checked with a thermometer, and it was a balmy 57 degrees inside. I cranked the dial all the way down to the coldest level, and I took its temperature again the next day.

It had dropped to 53 degrees. It was an improvement, but not enough of one. Also, the refrigerator is 19 years old, which in refrigerator years means it is almost time for a call from Al Roker.

So we bit the bullet and bought a new fridge. Cleaning out the old one to put everything into the new was like opening up a time capsule and discovering foods of times past.

Or maybe it was more like paging through an old high school yearbook. There are the boys who made fun of me. There is the girl I liked who wouldn’t go out with me. There is the girl who broke my heart.

High school wasn’t really a good time for me.

Cleaning out the fridge was like revisiting old friends and renewing forgotten acquaintances. Here are some of the things I found:

A bottle of hot pickled okra. How did that get there? When did that get there? I honestly have no recollection of it, but more than half of the okra was eaten, and I’m the only one who eats it.

Some meatloaf in the freezer, dated February 2024. It must have been good enough to keep, especially because I don’t like meatloaf. It doesn’t look so great now, it looks more like some science experiment on the North Pole that went horribly awry. Into the garbage it went.

Bagels in the freezer. I literally said, “We don’t have bagels� that very morning. My wife had brought home some cream cheese and lox, and I was lamenting, apparently inaccurately, that I had nothing on which to place it.

Four pounds of butter, frozen. I mean, I like butter. And I remember buying a couple of pounds on sale. But four pounds?

Packages of cheese, with a little bit of mold. Also, packages of mold, with a little bit of cheese.

No milk. My wife threw it out that morning, because it had gone bad. That is why we needed a new refrigerator.

Clear ice, which I had painstakingly made (though the process is actually pretty easy). I had to throw it out, because it took a couple of hours to install and restock the new refrigerator, and it had melted by then. I’m not sure there is enough room in the new freezer to make more.

A single wedge of frozen homemade demi-glace, which I had totally forgotten about.

Cup-sized Mason jars half filled with a clear liquid that I assume is vodka, because it was in the freezer and it wasn’t frozen. It may have been left over from times when I made horseradish vodka, because you have to pour a little out before you add the horseradish. I can’t remember the last time I made horseradish vodka.

A jar with the remnants of sriracha that was no longer the color of sriracha.

A couple of tubs of mole poblano that I spent an entire day making not that long ago and which I then placed in the freezer, where it mostly slipped my mind. It must have been hiding behind the butter.

A frozen slice of our wedding cake. When we got married 30 years ago, we put a slice in the freezer — but we didn’t realize we were supposed to eat it on our first anniversary. It has been thawed and refrozen a few times since then, and once, following a hurricane that cut our power for a full week, it was found in its plastic bag floating in a pool of raw and week-old chicken juice.

There is no way we or anyone else is ever going to eat that cake. But you had better believe that we transferred it to the freezer of our new refrigerator.