Retro is good when it comes to ice cubes. And retro ice cubes are good when it comes to cocktails.

This is the discovery I made with my vintage “Quickube” ice cube tray, something I picked up last week at a second hand shop just days before our Dowdy Corners holiday cocktail party, which was attended by DCCC members as well as friends from other parts of our lives.

I consider myself a passionate connoisseur of cocktails, fastidious about the method and quality of ingredients used in their making. With the exception of one core ingredient common to every drink: ice. Until finding Quickube, I had been lazily using the cubes that my freezer door spits out.

There are two problems with this: The cubes from my freezer’s built-in ice machine are too small—melting too quickly in drinks served on the rocks and splintering too easily when shaken, leaving unsightly shards of ice in cocktails—and the freezer uses a filter (who knows when I last changed it).

Furthermore, since cocktails are comprised of 25 percent water from melted ice, it’s important not to use chlorinated tap water when making ice cubes—another reason not to use the automatically generated freezer cubes, if you’re hooked up to city water.

How Quickubes behave when vigorously shaken or when bathed in a jigger or two of straight Kentucky bourbon (for which only a single cube will be necessary) is not their first or second pleasure. The first is releasing the cubes, which is accomplished by holding the Frigidaire-incised handle with one hand and pulling back on the Quickcube lever with the other. The second? Taking a moment to admire their crystalline, near prismlike quality and monumental size.

Their mass makes them a surprisingly cooperative photography subject—melting hardly a drop while I fumbled my way through a rushed photo session. Ice, I learned, it not easy to photograph, and my photograph does not fully capture their glacier beauty.

Note: The name Quickube is a misnomer. The cubes are anything but quick. Because of their size, they take a good 8 or more hours to freeze completely.