It seems mighty convenient to telephone your grocer to send up a pound of butter and have it come all squeezed tight into a nice square-cornered cardboard box whose bright and multi-colored label assures you that the butter has been properly deodorized fumigated, washed, sterilized, antisepticized and conforms in every other respect to the Food and Drugs Act, Serial 1762973-A. You read the label again and feel reasonably safe at meals.
Huh! Precious little grandmother knew about that kind of butter!
Hers came in a basket — a great big worn-brown-and-shiny, round bottom, willow basket, hand-wove. It didn’t come in any white-and-gold delivery wagon, either. It was delivered by a round-faced, rosy-checked, gingham-gowned picture of health, whose apron-strings barely met around the middle — for Frau Hummel brought it herself — after having first milked the cows with her own hands and wielded the churning-stick with her own stout German arms. She had the butter all covered up with fresh, sweet, white-linen cloths-and hand-moulded into big rolls — each roll wrapped in its own immaculate cloth — and when that cloth was slowly pulled away so that grandmother could stick the point of a knife in the butter and test it on her tongue, you could see the white salt all over the roll — and even the imprint of the cloth-threads . . . Good? . . . Why, you could eat it without bread!
“What else have you got today, Mrs. Hummel?” (Grandmother never could say “Frau” — and as if she didn’t know what else was in the basket!)
“Vell, Mrs. Van, dere is meppe some eks, und a dook — und also dere is left von fine stuffed geese.”
So the cloth covering was rolled farther back — and the 3-dozen eggs were gently taken out and put in the old tin eggbucket — and just then grandfather came in and lifted tenderly out of the basket one of those wonderful geese “stuffed” with good food in a dark cellar until fat enough for market. . . . Ever have a toothful of that kind of goose-breast or second joint? . . . No? . . . Your life is yet incomplete — you have something to live for! . . . Goodness me! I can’t describe it! How can a fellow tell about such things! It’s like — well, it’s like Frau Hummel’s “stuffed” goose, that’s all! . . .
And then it was weighed on the old balances, steels — (no, I don’t mean scales!) — steelyards, you know — a long-armed affair with a pear-shape of iron at one end and a hook at the other and a handle somewhere in between at the center-of-gravity, or some such place. . . . Anyway, they gave an honest pound, which is perhaps another respect in which they were different.
Then the ducks, too, were unwrapped from their white cloths and weighed — usually a pair of them — and the old willow basket had nothing left but its bundle of cloths when Frau Hummel started out again on her 10-mile walk to the farm.
Whenever I see a glassy-eyed, feather-headed, cold-storage chicken half plucked and discolored hanging in a present-day butcher-shop accumulating dust — or a scrawny duck almost popping through its skin — I think of Frau Hummel and her willow basket. . . .