Top Of The Milk

[poliphilo]

An ice cream van just went down the road with its chimes playing a song I remember from my 1950s childhood and which I can't think I've heard since. The chorus goes something like this.

You, me and us;
We are my favourite people
we both go together like peaches and cream
And bells and a church and a steeple.

Ghastly.

Is it a Doris Day number?

Ice cream vans never play anything up to date. I guess it's a copyright thing.

But now I can taste the tinned peach slices in syrup, with cream from the top of the milk bottle, which my mother used to give us for dessert.

"What's for pudding, mumma?"

"Peaches with top of the milk."

"Oooh-  super!" 

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this lovely moment from your childhood!

We had the Popsicle man. He had--get this: root beer Popsicles.

We'd be roaming the neighborhood with our nickles in our pockets and we'd hear the tinny music 'way down the street, so everybody ran, afraid he wouldn't see us.

Those peaches were good, weren't they? We had them, too, but with no cream, as we lived in a city without milk delivery.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We didn't call then popsicles- we called them ice lollies.

There was one with ice cream on the inside and strawberry lolly on the outside. This was called (God knows why) a Mivvi.

Then there were ones shaped like space rockets. They had names like Sky Ray and Boost.

Or have I made that last one up?

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Boost is my absolute favorite name.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

I liked blue popsickles. I'm still not sure what flavor they were, so when someone asked me what flavor I wanted I said "Blue". My Mom bought a 'popsickle set' for home (when they were frozen they were sort of a triangle shape, but the edges were softer...). I was the popsickle maker. I made them out of root beer Kool-Aid, and Grape, but never orange. I hated orange KoolAid. (Still do). I even made them out of iced tea - unsweetened, of course, because that's the way I drink my tea. Sometimes when we didn't have KoolAid because my folks couldn't afford sugar, I made them out of ice water.

For a little while when I was a kid, Mom used to get milk from a local farmer. It was NOT paturized. She had a big milk can (I'm still not sure how big it was, I was not even 10 yet). I don't know how she kept it cold...but I do remember it was good. And she'd take some of the cream off the top and make butter. We'd have cream on our oatmeal,or our cornmeal...

We did have milk delivered, later on, and it did have cream on top...but it never tasted quite as good as that germy old unpaturized stuff.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ailz contracted TB from unpasturised milk when she was a kid. Back then they were still experimenting with cures. Luckily for her she drew the long straw and was given the treatment that worked.

We had an ice lolly maker- but home-made lollies never tasted as good as the ones you bought in the shops. And the texture was wrong.

Also if you sucked them the flavour came out leaving the unflavoured ice behind.