Growing appetite for Orange’s iconic summer treats

The secret’s out! Middleton’s Ice blocks have been a summer staple in the Colour City for more than 75 years, but recent national attention has seen a growing appetite from further afield for the traditional icy treats.

For Marie Middleton, the summer brings with it a routine she has lived out for the past 40 years, ever since she bought the local ice block business from founder Max Muir.

“We filled the freezers there this morning and we will probably work again tomorrow,” Marie says, gesturing to the small factory building in the backyard of her Hill Street home.

“We haven't missed a day for a while,” adds husband, Dick Middleton, who joined his wife in the business in the 1990s.

“It's the heat that brings them in mainly; in the summertime it's go all the time… and then in the winter time, you're probably making once a month,” Marie continues.

“We try to, now, see if we can really work ourselves well through the week and have Saturday and Sunday off, because you need a bit of a break.”

The ice blocks are made today, just as they always have been. The ingredients are measured and mixed by hand in the small backyard factory, poured into moulds which are then placed into a brine tank, where the below-zero liquid quickly freezes the treats.

Sold unwrapped individually or in bags of 40, the water or milk-based ice blocks come in flavours such as lime, orange, raspberry, cola, blackcurrant, lemonade, pineapple,  chocolate, caramel, strawberry, banana, vanilla, coconut, mango and spearmint.

“We haven't changed it at all,” says Marie, “When we took it over from Max, we today still have the same flavours that he had… Well, we've got rockmelon, mango and blueberry now that probably wasn't in there when Max had them, but they're beautiful flavours.

“We tried coffee, but coffee wasn't a hit, so it just went by the wayside. We don't sell something that's not going to be liked by the people.”

Far from just being ‘liked’, Middleton’s ice blocks are a nostalgic obsession for generations of Orange locals and former residents, who make a pilgrimage down the Middleton’s driveway whenever they are back in town.

“Yeah, it's many generations have grown up with these, many,” says Marie. “You get people coming back now that remember buying the ice blocks for a tuppence! And then they've got their kids and their grandchildren, they're all coming back, it's incredible.

“And we've had people come and get them and take them far away from here,” continues Marie, who assures us that the bags of ice blocks can travel surprisingly far wrapped up in paper or even a doona.

The Middleton’s even had a customer who organised for a bag of the ice blocks to be shipped to Brisbane for her 60th birthday party. The theme of the party was ‘memories’, explains Marie, and for this women, her fondest memories of her childhood in Orange were of Middleton’s ice blocks.

“A lady came here and bought a bag of ice blocks, took them to the airport and they flew them up to Brisbane! So she bought a bag of ice blocks for $20 at the time and paid $86 or something to have them arrive there frozen,” Marie says.

When Marie took over the business in 1984, she says there were something like 45 local corner stores that they supplied with their ice blocks. Today, there are just five, but surprisingly they are still selling just as many as they ever have.

“They are stronger now than I've ever seen it!” says Dick. The people here a couple weeks ago… It was all day!”

The Middleton’s have seen sales boom this month after a story was published on the news website, Guardian Australia. 

“That was a big day, they were coming up and down here all day,” says Dick. “It wasn't one or two — bloody hundreds of them!”

"It wasn't hundreds,” corrects Marie, “but they were coming down well and truly… a couple came here on that day — they were just holidaying in Orange — and they had a niece or nephew over in San Francisco who’s said, ‘You're in Orange. You've got to go and see Middleton's go and check them out.’ And a lot of people said, ‘Oh, we've been in Orange for 12 months or been in Orange for a couple years and we didn't know you're here. 

“We gave a lot of ice blocks away on that day, just samples, and they all went out the driveway liking our ice blocks.”

Fortuitously, the timing of the story being published brought Middleton’s ice blocks to the attention of the numerous visiting cricket squads attending the recent Western NSW Junior Cricket Carnivals.

“They're all from Sydney and all over and a lot of these people read about it in the Guardian Australia and they're in Orange, so they came to Middleton's to see what the article was about and bought bags of ice blocks to take back to the kids playing cricket — it was a hot week,” says Marie.

“So it's incredible… and I didn't even know about the Guardian Australia, I didn't even know it existed!”

Next year will be Marie’s 40th year in the ice block business, but she has no plans to hang up the tools and retire just yet.

“Oh, we'd get lynched if we stopped anytime soon! But it just remains to be seen how long we can actually cope and  go on with it,” she says, whose son Glen also works with her and Dick in the business.

“He's annoying us here every day, which is a wonderful thing,” says Marie fondly. “So the answer to that is: one day, down the track, probably we’ll have to, but at the moment, definitely not!”