H4201.1

• california gold rush

Pepper or salt shaker. Material: tin. Shape: round with handle. Description: Painted tin toleware. From the History Information Station: This is a tin sugar shaker. Used for lightly dusting cakes, pies, and cookies with sugar to give them a sparkling decorative finish. Sugar was used profusely in 19th century cooking. It served as a preservative for fruits and vegetables in jams, jellies, sweet pickles and conserves. And of course it was the main ingredient in the desserts which followed almost every meal. One popular cookbook author insisted that a sweet dessert was the most important part of an enjoyable meal, for "the dessert certainly repays, in its general effect, the expenditure upon it of much pain, and it may be said, if there be any poetry at all in meals, or in the presence of feeding, there is poetry in the dessert."

Used: USA