Your point about the holders perhaps being installed wrong is entirely possible of course. In a local museum that shall remain nameless, there is one wooden item at one time manufactured in that locale which is showcased in its glass case, specially lighted, accompanied by informative placard…..and upside-down.

I’m starting to think this is a toaster, and somehow the holders got installed wrong.

For dry ice, the only place I ever go is Washtenaw Dairy.

Perhaps it holds a pair of socks or mittens and dries them off after a long day of sledding. Then you could grate marshmallows for your hot chocolate, which you would enjoy while planning a trip to some place warm like Tikal.

Perhaps pre-freezing the marshmallow would make it more grateable? Ideally with some dry ice, since that’s all fume-y and cool. Then I bet you could grate that puppy from here to breakfast. I have a lovely mandolin you could borrow but you’re on your own as for sourcing dry ice in AA (didn’t I read a Chronicle story about where to buy it?)

I tried this out with an actual grater and reasonably stale marshmallows as suggested. It was not a successful experiment, unless you count as success the mangling of a marshmallow into a grotesque goo. It fell fall short of anything resembling gratings, and left me crying bitter tears of disappointment.

To my knowledge the CW was the primary agent that helped popularize canned food, like coffee extract, in the US, even though Napoleon had spurred the idea of canning food more than a half century earlier by offering a prize for a method of food preservation that would aid in his Russian campaign.

For a gruesome example of some of the adulteration that went into CW canned foods I recommend the excellent novel “Sherman’s March” by Cynthia Bass.