Just Desserts
and The Magic Spoon
In my treasure box, there is a silverplate
cream-top spoon. It has been around since long before I entered
this world.
Silverwood's Dairy made a glass bottle
that had a neck near the top and then the bottle curved out again
- almost like a glass head and body. There was a cardboard cap
on the bottle.
In those days, the milk was pasteurized
but not homogenized. There was no 1% or 2% milk; it was whole
milk and the cream rose to the top. I remember how, in the cold
Canadian winters, the milk froze, pushing the cardboard cap and
the cream up, out of the bottle. It appeared, in my eyes, like
a glass lady with a top-knot on her head.
Silverwood's issued a cream-top spoon,
shaped to go into the bottle and sit right in the neck. That way,
the cream could be poured off easily.
My mother always made dessert for supper,
even if it was her deliciously lick-your-lips homemade fruit preserves,
which she apologetically called a simple, mid-week, make-do dessert.
It was anything but, to me.
She would pour the cream off the milk,
using the fancy, but practical-shaped spoon. The cream was whipped;
then she layered a graham wafer, a peach half, another graham
wafer and peach half, and then topped it with the whipped cream.
We all enjoyed our dessert that my mother made for us and we gladly
drank the milk.
When I was young, I always thought that
spoon was magic. It was war-time and food was rationed, but, that
magic spoon and Silverwood's ingenuity allowed us delicious desserts
every night. If it was not her scrumptious apple pie or our much-loved
variety of layer cakes, my mother said that it was "just
dessert".
In later years, when milk was homogenized,
the cream-top bottle with the neck became extinct and, too, the
spoon.
One day, many years later, my mother came
across it at the back of the kitchen cutlery drawer and asked
if I would like to have it, even if it was not of use any more.
I confessed to her that I had always thought of it as a magic
spoon and that I would keep it and treasure it for as long as
I lived.
I have done just that and often think of
our "just desserts". ~Joan Adams Burchell~ (copyright)
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