What Is It?

Looks like a candle holder maybe....or a tea bag dipper.....

Anyway, Merry Christmas (or whatever you celebrate) to All!

A spoon

Poached egg ladle.

Used to scoop cream from the top of milk....the cream always rises to the top....

Maybe a guess, but correct. The scoop was in my kitchen drawer, and a couple of the "cream top" bottles were in the basement pantry. Insert spoon/scoop into special bottle as shown, and pour off the cream, or just shake it up if you preferred homogenized milk. The bottles are very collectible now. Used by Silverwood's dairy, back when they used horse-drawn milk delivery wagons.

I definitely remember milk bottles with the cream bulging out the top when it froze on the front porch in the '40s and early '50s (in Colorado), but I don't remember that extra constriction at roughly the bottom of the cream.

This is a cream scoop given away in the 1920's as an advertisement.

That is exactly the scoop shown with the cream top bottle in #7. I thought they were unique only to the regional Silverwood's dairy here in Ontario. Obviously I was wrong. Many of the older houses in the area still have milk doors - a small compartment built into an outer wall with an inner and outer door to receive milk deliveries and to leave empty bottles. Sometimes, on cold mornings, the milk would freeze in the wall compartment, expand, and the cardboard caps on the bottles would be suspended on the top of a short column of frozen cream. Milk wagons were still used in the 50's, drawn by big, placid horses that didn't mind having their snouts scratched by us kids.

We had those down here in Texas. I've pointed out to people that we drank low fat milk before it became socially acceptable. The cream in the top part of the bottle was used to put in the coffee. And for the rural people, after the milking, the cream would rise to the top and be skimmed off leaving skimmed milk-today it's called low fat milk. The cream was used for coffee and to make butter. Most of the milk we consumed was "low fat" milk.

When I was growing up,we did not have refrigerators,we had ice boxes,where a block of ice was put into a compartment in the top of the ice box,and the melt water was captured below for drinking on hot days.

The ice man came around with his mule and wagon and replaced the ice when needed.

The ice was stacked with hay between the layers,and he was an expert in chipping off a exact fit for the box with no measuring required.

Nothing got really cold,only cool.

Nothing better than sneaking a cup of cream off of the top of the gallon milk jar in the ice box.

There was an art to pouring only the cream without much milk from the large mouth Mason jar.

You had to get your timing just right and set up a slight gentle wave action,and get the cream at the crest of the wave.Too much action would mix the cream and milk and you would have to wait a while.

If you have never drank fresh,unpasteurized, non-homogenized milk,you have no idea what milk really tastes like.

All commercial milk has a slight spoiled-milk taste to it,but you get used to it after a while and accept it as normal,until you once again taste really fresh milk and you remember what it is supposed to taste like.

I guess I could use it as a candle holder or poached egg ladle, since its original purpose has passed into history. Found it in the kitchen drawer of my old house. Hadn't seen one since I was a kid. Probably only someone raised in Southern Ontario would know what it is.

Nice to see something that reminds me I'm not as old as I feel- I've lived all my life in Southern Ontario and just learned about this now!

It's a soup ladle, brings back memories.

Looks like a baby spoon I had as an infant. It is bent to make it hard to swallow or poke one's self.

I say a multipurpose tool used for all the above uses as well as putting gravy on potatoes and making pancakes.

A punch bowl drink ladle, perhaps?...

Godzilla's coke spoon.

one of Uri Geller's practice spoons?