I recently watched a video about cooking an 18th-century dessert featured in Hanna Glass’s cookbook from that period, and the recipe calls for orange juice, from oranges specifically from Seville, Spain. How would someone living in colonial North America acquire such oranges? Wouldn’t they spoil on the long sea journey?
As a more general statement: to what extent did people living in Thirteen Colonies and early United States have access to perishable items like exotic fruits or vegetables? How would they be treated/packaged/transported to prevent spoilage?
Caveat: I'm far from an expert on this, but I happen to have looked it up recently.
The short answer is (sorry), using ice.
In the early 1800s, entrepreneurs began cutting ice from the surface of lakes, ponds, etc. and selling it to help keep ice boxes cool. If you've ever seen Frozen (a very historically accurate film ;) ) this is shown at the beginning and one of the main characters works to "farm" the ice. In essence all that they did was cut pieces of ice large enough that there would be substantial ice left even if some outer layers melted away in warmer climates.
One of the big problems in shipping the ice wasn't the shipping itself, but more so where to put the ice once it reached the much warmer locale. They used Ice Houses - similar to a less-than-modern refrigerator, to store ice. They were buildings built either underground or dug into the ground, and packed with insulators like peat or sawdust that would be kept very cold in the winter, then retaining the cool temperature for a few months into the warmer weather.
By the mid-1800s, Reefers, refrigerated cargo ships, were created that allowed more efficient transportation of goods by ship. Similar to ice houses, the interior of the ship was insulated and then cooled by ice, and then filled with the perishable goods. Later, compression machinery was installed and powered by the ships' boilers which operated similarly to the refrigerator in your home today.
For additional info about modernization of refrigerated shipping, this may interest you. I listened to a 99% Invisible episode some time back that at least partially covered what I think you're asking. You can listen to it here but I'll do my best to pull interesting pieces below.
When goods arrived in port, the local economy would be flooded with that single commodity, be it fresh produce or frozen meat. Prices dropped, food was wasted, and consumers got fed up with eating too much of one product at a time.
Thus, before it was cool to convert cargo containers into habitable architecture, some scientists created their own mobile laboratory inside a shipping container. This research lab had to be transported alongside cargo-filled containers as they made their way through the supply chain, from train to truck to ship. Installing the lab within a container was a natural choice.
One of these scientists, Barbara Pratt, is now the head of Reefer Services for Maersk, but in the 1970s she was a recent college graduate commissioned by General Foods to study container refrigeration. For seven years, she traveled with 40-foot converted steel box workspace that contained a giant computer, as well as a shower, microwave, bunk beds and, of course, a refrigerator.