Imagine if every time you opened a new box of cereal you found a pretty ceramic dish, perfect and flawless. Imagine this a real thing, that you could build a whole set of decorative dinnerware, enough for your family, of quality to last a lifetime and even pass on, just by having breakfast as usual.
In this age of sticker-shock on shrinking cereal boxes (holding cereal only) it is almost more than the mind can absorb! But indeed the 1911 acquisition of "Mother's Oats" by the Quaker Oats Company spurred an effort to encourage Americans to eat more oats, with pretty dishes in the boxes being a "carrot" to the consumer.
Previously, oats in America were more prevalently consumed as animal feed. The company's promotional brainstorm caused a quick stir of the pot, of oatmeal into bowls, inside of human kitchens. Women were said to have purchased (many) boxes of oatmeal ahead, and it is not hard to think they may even have emptied many boxes into bulk containers in their pantries. After all, the traditional Sunday dinners of the era needed pretty dishes, the sooner a full set the better.
I didn't have such a set handed down to me, but I still kept somebody's grandma's dishes, and I treat them as if I inherited them.
And I do not mean like fine china, used only for special occasions and stored protectively all the rest of the time.
I started my "set" by chance of having come across one pretty plate, a story told in a previous column. The one pretty plate turned into an eventual collection, for some time treated as so precious it did in fact fall into that "sheltered" category. Saved out, in a display cupboard, in "look but do not touch" style.
But one day I noticed something upon dusting them, a chore that comes to pass when pretty plates never fulfill their intended purpose.
"Score" lines, gentle creases over the colorful flowers of the plates caught my attention. Not noticeable at a glance, up close and personal these lines spoke to me. They evoked distinctive images to me of knife-and-fork meals, of an attentive mother setting up a feast for her beloved family and everyone at the table diving in, with gusto and appreciation.
I thought of bread and butter and roasted meats and vegetables, of salads and side dishes, of contented sighs and harmonious conversations. My plates experienced all of that and more, and now emerged to tell me the tale about it.
They said, "We are none the worse for the wear."
And so I began using them, every day even. They were made in America and are the exemplification of quality, and yes, none the worse for the wear! Many decades past their exit from an oatmeal box, they still thrill my senses.
Their delightful entry into my everyday sphere really doesn't grow old. Each time they are wiped and set into the cupboard I am reminded of a time I didn't live in, but somehow still feel nostalgia for.
It is that way for the things we wish we might have experienced, in the gentler annals of history.
And I must end this column comparing the easier opening of that kind of "cereal" over the challenges of opening the boxes of today's many kinds of cold cereals. Sealed in wax bags as they now are, they can present quite the frustration to opening, at least to one impatient, "manly" man of this writer's household.
He might be able to chop, drag, split and stack cords upon cords of firewood better than any man I have ever known, but open a box of cereal without it exploding onto every surface of his wife's carefully tended kitchen? Pour himself a bowl of the contents without mutilating the box? Make an easy breakfast for his wife without declaring a cardboard box and wax bag childproof and impossible??!!
No, he can't do that. So, any time I hear murmurings that it is time to open a new box, I am off and running, full speed ahead, "Let me get that for you, Honey."
And alas, I haven't found one pretty dish yet!
If readers are interested in the tale of my first plate find (and other stories) please "like" my Less is Plenty page on Facebook.
