I bet you never owned a sugar pail, or a whipped cream pail, or a special bowl for marshmallow, or a special little dish to hold ice around your glass of dinner time tomato juice. (If you do have a couple of these lurking in your cupboard please leave a comment.)
Sugar pails look like miniature ice buckets. The Trojan sugar pail is 3 3/4 inches tall and 3 1/4 inches wide at the top. I’m assuming people used it for sugar cubes or else used it when they wanted more than a sugar bowl might hold. (That is a lot of sugar!) Or perhaps it went in the cocktail cupboard so it was easy to bring out and use in mixed drinks.
Fostoria’s whipped cream pail is shorter, about 2 5/8 inches tall. We simply put whipped cream in a bowl if we are putting it out for people to serve themselves, but why not use a classy piece like this pail instead?
Of course you could use a bowl for the whipped cream instead and yes, there is one of those too.
I’m being a little sarcastic here with these fun pieces. I think it would be wonderful to have a need for special pieces like this and space in your cupboards to store them. Also, there is nothing saying you couldn’t use the very pretty whipped cream bowl for more than cream, it is about 6 inches across and 2 inches high so it would be perfect when you have things to serve that don’t need big bowls.
It’s a little harder to imagine using the sugar pail or whipped cream pail. We keep sugar we intend to use at meals in a bowl with a lid to keep it clean, and after thinking about it, I suspect back in the day the sugar pail would be part of the serving ware for mixing drinks vs. being part of a dinnerware set.
This has been a fun post to write. I enjoy imagining how people used such elegant pieces in their normal lives back in the early 1930s. If you have thoughts please leave a comment.
We’ll cover marshmallow bowls and tomato juice tumblers with ice dishes in the next post.