Seeing An Jing smiling happily, saying she didn’t feel hot at all, Xiao Changyi’s mood naturally improved as well.
Then, he lay down and faced An Jing.
An Jing smiled and watched him for a while before her gaze shifted to the chunks of ice in the wooden bucket, "Husband, all this ice must have been expensive, right?"
"Meng Zhuqing said it cost three hundred taels."
An Jing sighed, "That expensive...?" She had thought that a few dozen taels would suffice; evidently, she had underestimated the value of ice here.
But it was no wonder ice was so valuable here; after all, they had no electricity or refrigerators.
Here, ice was cut and stored in ice cellars during the winter to be used in the summer.
Immediately, An Jing’s face turned troubled: "Just this once cost three hundred taels, and who knows when this hot weather will end. If we use ice every day , it’s really too wasteful of money."
Also, because the weather was too hot, Qian Wei Tavern was not doing very well business-wise. She truly felt pained over the expenditure—the money she earned from Qian Wei Tavern was meant to be used to open many grain stores for stockpiling reserves, not on buying ice.
And she was pregnant. She could endure the heat, but she feared that it might harm the two little ones in her belly.
Therefore, even though she felt it was a waste of money, she still needed to buy it.
Xiao Changyi said, "Our family isn’t lacking silver coins."
An Jing still frowned, "It’s true our family doesn’t lack money, but I still think it’s quite wasteful."
"What would you have us do?"
An Jing immediately deflated, "I don’t know... If only we knew how to make ice ourselves, then we wouldn’t need to spend silver to buy it, and I wouldn’t—" feel it wasteful.
Before An Jing could finish speaking, her eyes suddenly lit up, and she exclaimed in surprise: "Making ice?!"
Xiao Changyi was startled by her and asked anxiously, "What’s wrong?"
"Making ice, Husband!" An Jing was ecstatic. She remembered from her high school chemistry class, when saltpeter dissolves in water, it absorbs heat, lowering the temperature and enabling water to freeze into ice.
And they had saltpeter right here!
Xiao Changyi, realizing that nothing was wrong with An Jing and that she was just excited, let go of his concern and calmly asked, "Do you know how to make ice?"
He knew that her former world was much more advanced than their current one, so he wasn’t at all surprised that she might know how to make ice.
Moreover, having gotten used to his wife’s astonishing actions through previous experiences with the rice-fish, grain rice, and white paper, he found nothing unusual in this.
"Mhm, I didn’t think of it just now, but I’ve remembered," An Jing was still very excited, chuckling happily. "Husband, saltpeter absorbs heat when put in water, we can use this to make ice."
Xiao Changyi knew An Jing had more to say, so he listened quietly as she continued.
Sure enough, An Jing went on: "We can take a large basin and put saltpeter in it, fill it with water, then place a smaller basin inside the large one and put some water in it as well. That way, not only will the water in the large basin freeze due to the saltpeter absorbing heat, the water in the small basin will also freeze. And the ice that forms in the small basin will be edible."
The ice in the large basin would be contaminated by the saltpeter and not edible, but the small basin would remain uncontaminated. If the water put in the small basin was clean to start with, then the ice that formed would truly be edible.
"When the time comes, if we want to eat ice, we’ll eat what’s in the small basin. We’ll let the ice in the large basin slowly melt, just like now. Not only will we not feel hot, but we’ll also save silver."