Three American & English Sterling Silver Sugar Casters

North America, United States, Michigan, Detroit; New York, Brooklyn; Northern Europe, England, Birmingham. A trio of muffineers, the tall lidded casters once set beside the tea table to dust cinnamon sugar over hot muffins and toast. The largest rises from a stepped square plinth on ball feet through a baluster body to a reeded shoulder and a pierced dome cover with turned finial, marked on the underside of the foot for the Detroit retailer L.B. King & Co. and stamped Sterling. The midsize example takes an elegant urn form with girdled bands and a tall pierced ogee cap, its foot marked Sterling with a horse head in a shield for the Friedman Silver Company of Brooklyn. The most petite, of lobed pedestal form beneath a flame finial, carries Birmingham hallmarks with an anchor, lion passant, date letter K for 1934, and the mark of Samuel Blanckensee & Son Ltd. The muffineer takes its name from the English muffin, and the form crystallized in the 18th century as a caster tall enough to hold at the table, with a domed, pierced cover for sifting spiced sugar. By the 20th century the type had become a staple of both English and American silver services, where it doubled as a sugar or pepper caster. Samuel Blanckensee & Son Ltd. worked from Birmingham and registered marks well into the 1930s, its output aimed at the enormous middle-class market for small dressing-table and table silver that Birmingham dominated. The Friedman Silver Company was founded in Brooklyn in 1908 and is remembered for hollowware struck with its horse-head-in-a-shield device before its absorption by Gorham in the 1960s. L.B. King & Co. was a Detroit jeweler and retailer rather than a manufacturer; its name on the foot records who sold the piece, not who raised it, a distinction worth keeping in mind when reading American marks of this period. Item # 202757

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