Jan Norris: Food and Florida

by Scott Simmons, columnist

Scott Simmons

My great-grandmother, Lilla Chason Griffin, was a practical woman.

Granny, born in 1888, made her own mops from cornhusks, and brooms from the broomstraw that grew along the roadsides. She matched her feed and flour sacks to fabric she already had to make dresses, aprons and such.

Lilla Chason Griffin (left) and Lizzie Chason Thompson as teenagers

It wasn’t easy living on the farm in south Georgia. She might’ve already collected eggs and milked a cow or two before breakfast. Evenings would find her sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of her dogtrot farmhouse shelling butter beans or field peas, all the while gossiping with her twin sister, Lizzie, who lived just up the road.

And if her hands weren’t busy doing that, they would have been holding a jar of cream.

Homemade butter churn

Granny didn’t have a churn. Instead, she rocked back and forth, gently shaking a Mason or Ball jar full of cream until it turned to butter.

Once the cream had thickened, she would have salted the butter and spooned it into this mold, patented in 1950 by T.R. Hall of Burlington, N.C.:

The company’s claim to fame: The wing handle made it easy to turn the butter from the mold, and the striped pattern on the inside of the plunger kept the butter from sticking to the plunger.

Vintage – not antique

Chason twins on their 87th birthday

I always had imagined the mold hailed from the early days of aluminum kitchenware, in the 1920s and ’30s, so I was surprised when I learned it was made after 1950.

Granny’s daughter, my grandmother Dorothy, always had the mold proudly displayed on a bookcase, as though it were some treasured artifact. Internet searches find them priced around $20.

It’s not ancient, but what a treasure it is! One look at the mold, and I hear the creak of a rocker and get a hankering for cornbread slathered with homemade butter.

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Scott Simmons is a South Florida writer whose passion is antique china and glassware. He has written about collectibles for more than 10 years as The Palm Beach Post’s “Look What We Found” columnist. His Kitchen Kollectibles column highlights food and dining ephemera. Write him at scott.simmons.writer@gmail.com.