Lynn Shapiro

When we cleaned out Mom’s apartment, I found the creamer and sugar bowl packed away with stuff she hadn’t used in decades. I was surprised she’d kept them all these years. An abstract expressionist artist and a University of Chicago alum, Mom wasn’t one for nostalgia or sentimentality. The creamer and sugar bowl were the only pieces left from the first set of dishes my parents bought when they were married in 1941. They were part of the Desert Rose collection manufactured by Franciscan pottery of California and were the only dishes we had until I was well into grade school. Then, Mom’s Rosenthal china became the “good” dishes, and Desert Rose our “everyday” crockery.

The creamer and sugar bowl were a breakfast fixture on our green Formica and chrome kitchen table, along with matching cereal bowls and a big box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. They say “Home and Hearth” to me like nothing else, and bring back memories of sneaking way too many spoonfuls of sugar onto my cornflakes.

When we were growing up in Lombard back in the 1950s and ‘60s, lunches of tomato soup with Saltines appeared in the same “Desert Rose” bowls, accompanied by grilled cheese on matching salad plates. Dinners of chewy roast beef and lima beans or tuna casserole with Kraft macaroni and cheese took place on dinner-sized “Desert Rose” plates, with desserts of Eskimo Pie or blueberry crumble on a miniature version, which we used as dessert plates. Mom passed away at the age of 100 last September. Cooking family meals was not one of her many remarkable talents or interests, but her "Desert Rose” creamer and sugar bowl call up especially sweet memories, if not of gourmet cuisine, of a more innocent time in American family life.