Straitjackets Magazine Presents "Cream" by Christina Hoag

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A personal memoir essay By CHRISTINA HOAG
The word takes me back to my childhood when spray-can cream didn’t exist, when people would have shuddered at the paragraph of unpronounceable ingredients on the label of Fat-Free Cool Whip, when calories, carbs and cholesterol were purely medical terms. That was back in New Zealand, where I grew up. It was a land of dairy where no one dreamed of a diet deprived of copious amounts of butter, milk, cheese and cream from grass-engorged cows. They were the prime staples in any home’s larder. When I was a girl, I would skip to the gate in the morning to pick up the two pints of milk the milkman delivered at dawn. The glass bottles would already be perspiring in the saffron glow of the day’s rising sun. Under the bottles’ silver-foil lids, which us kids would flatten into make-believe coins, rested a plug of ivory cream on top of the milk. I eyed that cream jealously because I knew it would be squabbled over at the breakfast table with my sister and brother. There was nothing as grand as eating cornflakes in cream, letting that liquid ribbon of satin glide over the tongue. It seemed the height of rich living. My mother took cream with her coffee. Every morning she dropped a whipped whiff into her cup along with spoonfuls of brown sugar. The cream would melt into a layer of floating foam that would leave her with a light mustache when she sipped. She flicked her upper lip clean with her tongue-tip as she lowered her cup to its waiting saucer. Cream was the companion of all desserts back then so a bowl of whipped cream was a de rigueur item in the fridge, but it took work. I stood on a chair to reach the kitchen counter, apron tied under my armpits, and tossed a dash of vanilla and a splash of sugar into the bowl. Then I whipped the liquid cream with a metal hand beater. I churned the little wooden handle round and round and round until my arm muscles ached and the liquid miraculously turned into a snowy cloud. My reward was licking the beater clean of every droplet when the cream was finally whipped. Whipping cream was a major production when we visited my aunties in the countryside. They ordered several pints of milk and a half a pint of cream from the milkman every day, making a veritable industry of baking the cakes and puddings and desserts to go with it. Before lunch and dinner, we slathered that whipped cream between layers of sponge cakes, atop trifles, or	over pavlovas, a meringue cake that, when baked to perfection, was as light as the ballet dancer for which it was named. Sometimes we even enjoyed cream between meals, especially if visitors were expected. Afternoon tea was rolled into the front room on a trolley. The teapot, always clad in a hand-knit tea cozy, sat next to a lace doily on which we placed a plate stacked with oven-fresh scones or a Victoria sandwich cake. I would smother the scone with homemade jam – red currant, gooseberry, raspberry, whatever was the recent season’s garden harvest – and plop a generous spoonful of cream on top. Jam and cream were combined to create the filling in a sandwich cake. Biting into a slice was tricky – cream and jam would ooze out and smear over my cheeks. I’d have to hastily catch the overspill from the slice with a curl of my tongue before it dropped, but I wasn’t always on time. A scrubbing at the sink was usually in order afterward. Sometimes we would forego the whipping and simply pour liquid cream from a jug on to a plateful of strawberries or raspberries, but first we had to pick the fruit. My Auntie Esther would dispatch us, equipped with bowls as bottomless as our bellies, to the raspberry patch outside her back door. We delved into the thicket of canes and plucked the raspberries until our fingers and mouths ran bloody with scarlet juice and our tummies ached. At lunch time, we piled the raspberries into our dishes with a dusting of confectioner’s sugar, and emptied the cream jug over them so the berries looked like islands of fuschia nipples lapped by a sea of silk. Who eats cream with such luxurious abandon anymore? In spite of it all, no one was really obese back then, pudgy, for sure, but not grotesquely fat. But that was in the day when there were no drive-through windows, no buses to school, no 24-hour cartoon channels, no remote controls. We all worked off what we ate without a lot of effort. Not like today. Before a family gathering last year, my sister and I took a run to the grocery to pick up last minute ingredients for the day’s meal. As we bent over the dairy case, checking the fat content of cheeses and margarines, our eyes set upon it at the same time – cream. We eyed each other, afraid to even suggest such sinful consumption, but we knew what the other was thinking. My sister snatched the cream and threw it in the basket. It was done. We had splurged. Tonight we were going to indulge in the past and not feel a shred of guilt. Until tomorrow. Then we’d hit spinning class and long for the days when we didn’t have to consider cream a treat. END
Christina Hoag has been a journalist for more than twenty years. She is currently a reporter with The Associated Press and based in Los Angeles. She also writes fiction and has recently had a romance novella accepted for publication.