Refrigerator cookies are so named because logs of dough are placed in the fridge long enough to become solid enough to slice into round discs of dough to shape the cookies. The name “Icebox Cookies” hails from a different era, when our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had iceboxes, not refrigerators. We still hear them named so in many recipes, and we’ve kept it for historical interest and also because people still call them that!