The Clabber Girl Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana, is a delight for anyone interested in American material culture. Clabber Girl: as in baking powder, a product of Hulman & Company, which began as a grocery wholesaler in the mid-nineteenth century. The 1893 Hulman Building houses the museum, whose contents are, well, varied: advertising signage, a hansom cab, a massive generator wheel, old telephones, pneumatic tubes for interoffice memos, a 1912 Burroughs adding machine, a Remington manual typewriter, ledgers, a walk-in safe, WWII ration books, S&H Green Stamps, a Western Union clock (“Official Time,” it says), and recreations of a Victorian parlor and a 1940s kitchen. Now-defunct Hulman brands stand in boxed and canned majesty on shelves and in vitrines: Dauntless Butter Beans, Farmers Pride Chopped Turnip Greens, Presto Cleanser. My favorite thing: a program from a 1937 Clabber Girl Baking Powder Salesmen’s Dinner Dance. The vegetables of course were canned.
Elaine and I made a second discovery this weekend: driving home, we took an exit we’d never taken and ended up on the charming Lost Bearings Road.
[Clabber: “milk that has naturally clotted on souring” (New Oxford American Dictionary). It was mixed with potash to make a leaven. Clabber Girl Double Acting Baking Powder contains cornstarch, sodium bicarbonate, anhydrous sodium aluminum sulfate and monocalcium phosphate.]
Monday, April 25, 2011
The Clabber Girl Museum
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comments: 10
Yes, but why the second hyphen (is that the right word?) in "mid-nineteenth-century"? I have a feeling I'm going to get it in the neck now!
No, that’s my mistake. I’m going to fix it right now.
Barnaby, "get it in the neck" is a wonderful expression!
Thanks for not giving it to me in the neck, Barnaby and Stefan.
Michael and Stefan: What do you Americans say in place of "get it in the neck", I wonder?
Incidentally, am I right in thinking that in the US you follow a colon with a capital letter? We don't in England.
I’d suggest “catch hell.”
I follow Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage on the colon — no capital unless the colon introduces a series of sentences.
Thank you, Michael.
I favor Clabber Girl, but Calumet is also a good baking powder. Baking powder expires, and I never use but about half of it before I have to toss the rest. Know any other uses (aside from baking?)
Here are some non-baking uses.
Interesting--but I definitely think they have it mixed up with baking soda (odors, tooth-brushing, etc.) I like the 'test' bit-- I have had some yeast biscuit failures due to older BP. Tsk.
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