Tempeltons
Tempelton’s
Another bite sized chunk of Blantyre History
From Forrest Street, Glasgow Road ran west for about 200yds On this block from Forrest Street to Clark Street again all two storey |
The first was “Tempelton’s” this store was unique in that they would display a lot of their dry goods in shelves and canvas bags on the pavement directly outside the store, and as you can imagine this was asking for trouble with us kids around. I recall many a stolen mouthful of Oats, Carrot, Peapod’s, Dog Biscuits, you name we stole and eat it. In them there good old days there was very little of packaged goods, mostly everything came in bulk, and most of that was in canvas bags and wooden casks. |
The butter arrived in a cask probably weighing around 100lbs it was hoisted by hand up on the the marble counter top where the cask was stripped away. The butter was wrapped in cheese cloth which had to be wetted down and stripped off.
The butter was hand cut and shaped with two wooden paddles, again into the size required by the costumer. You have to remember that there was no refrigeration then and things could get rather sticky, so a fair amount of water was being used to counteract the stickiness.
The Cheese was in a rounded ball of about 50 lbs, this too was up on the counter, outer layers of cheese cloth stripped off and duly cut into the proportions required by the customer. The hand cutting of cheese was done with a piano type wire. |
Note from Bill: One of my jobs on a Saturday morning at Norris’s grocers on Glasgow Road was to strip the cheese of its cheesecloth using a very sharp knife, sometimes easy but often quite difficult because the cheesecloth was stuck so hard to the cheese.
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Continuing the conversation between Thomas Dunsmuir Hartman in Chicago, formerly Logan Street, (known as TDH or Drapadew) and Margaret in Queensland Australia on TalkingScot.
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