Occasionally, I run across an object that takes me back across the
years – to a moment, to a scene. Sometimes it is a flash to a time and a place
in my own life. But this time, it is a moment in my mother’s life.
When I was a child, there was a tin measuring cup in our kitchen. We
used it daily, never taking special care or notice. The slogan imprinted on the
front stated, “Swans Down cake flour makes better cakes.” But time moved on. My
grandmother passed away, I grew up, and my parents moved from the house where I
had grown up. They moved to a neighboring town, and then to a different house
in that same town. Then I got married and relocated to the East Coast. My
parents divorced and my mother moved to Central Illinois; then with the failure
of her second marriage, she moved back to southern Illinois.
The reason I mention all these transitions is that in the process of all
these moves, the Swans Down cup went missing from my mother’s kitchen.
It was years later that she told me about the cup. My husband and I had
taken to visiting antique shops while on vacation, and while relating to Mom
tales of the nostalgia brought on by antiquing, I asked if there was anything
she wanted me to keep an eye out for.
“Do you remember the Swans Down cup?” she asked.
“Indeed, I do; it was always in our kitchen in Zeigler.”
Well, somewhere in all my moves I’ve lost it, and I would love to get
another one.”
My Grandma Chamness (her mother) had been quite the cook in her day.
When baking cakes, she only used Swans Down flour. And there was a time when the purchase of a
five-pound bag of flour included a tin measuring cup. When my mother was a
small girl, she would help make cakes by pouring in the ingredients for her
mother. In my mind’s eye I can see the small, dark-eyed girl with her rapt,
pixie-like face. She was concentrating on not spilling the flour, and on stirring
the batter just right, so all the ingredients were mixed, while at the same
time taking care that nothing spilled over the sides of the bowl. And I know my
grandmother let her lick the icing off the spoon once the cake was iced. All in
the presence of a little tin measuring cup.
It took Eric and me years of searching in antique shops to find the
right cup. Evidently on the East Coast, Swans Down flour was not a brand in
circulation. We found similar cups from another brand of flour. But no Swans
Down.
It was Eric who finally found the cup, and we presented it to
Mom on our next trip home. She took it out of the tissue paper and held it to
her heart for a moment. She was seeing what I am seeing now – the scene of a
genteel mother, teaching her daughter the proper way to make a cake, with Swans
Down flour and an abundance of love.
