Androck Hand-i-Sift One-Hand Flour Sifter, Tulip and Scroll Decal with Painted Wood Handle, The Washburn Company, Rockford, Illinois, c. 1945–1955

The Piece

A one-hand flour sifter in cream-painted tin, with a squeeze lever and a red wooden grip.

The front carries a printed decal: three red tulips rising from dark green leaves inside a scrolled yellow cartouche, with pink flourishes trailing from the base. It is the Pennsylvania-Dutch idiom that ran through American kitchens in the middle of the century — tulips, scrolls, and not much else.

The back of the body is embossed straight into the metal, not printed: an oval reading ANDROCK, then Hand-i-Sift in script, and beneath it MADE IN U.S. OF A.

Look inside and the mechanism is all there: a single fine mesh screen with a six-arm wire agitator turning on a central hub. Squeeze the lever and the arms sweep the flour through.

The handle is shaped wood painted red, held in a riveted nickel-toned bracket, worn through to bare wood along the gripping edge.

History & Provenance

The name is a merger written down. Androck comes from a 1917 combination of a Chicago wire goods division with the Andrews Wire and Iron Works of Rockford, Illinois — And plus rock. The parent firm traces to 1880, when Charles Washburn started the business incorporated two years later as the Wire Goods Company; after further mergers it became The Washburn Company in 1922, working out of Rockford, Illinois and Worcester, Massachusetts.

Androck made the whole drawer: nut choppers, onion choppers, pastry blenders, graters, ladles, egg beaters. But the sifters are what it is remembered for, and the one-hand action is why — the cook keeps a hand free for the bowl. Production ran until 1975, when the Worcester plant closed.

The wooden handle is the dating evidence, and it is specific. Androck's pre-war kitchenware is known for bright Catalin plastic handles in red, yellow and green. This sifter has no plastic anywhere — it has shaped wood, painted red. Plastics went to the war effort, and wood came back into American kitchenware as the substitute; it stayed in use through the years immediately after.

The decal points the same way. Androck's 1950s work is remembered for atomic-era graphics — starbursts, boomerangs, hard geometry. This is none of that. A scrolled cartouche with tulips is the older, softer kitchen idiom that preceded it.

Wood rather than Catalin, and tulips rather than atoms, put it in a narrow window between the two: c. 1945–1955.

One detail is the previous owner's, not the factory's: a small mark in ink on the lower front and a small punched hole beside it. The mark is not a maker's stamp and it is not legible as anything; the hole was made by hand, most likely to hang the sifter on a nail.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A sifter is one of the few old kitchen tools that has not been improved on, and this one still works.

The one-hand action is the whole point. Hold the bowl in one hand, squeeze with the other, and the flour goes where you are looking — which is why these outsold every crank-handle sifter on the market. Cake flour, powdered sugar over a finished tart, cocoa, matcha, a dusting over a work surface before you roll: it does all of it, and it does it better than shaking a sieve.

It is also a good-looking object doing nothing. Cream, red, yellow and green is a full kitchen palette in one small tin, and the tulips read from across a room. On an open shelf, a windowsill, a hutch or the back of a counter it earns its space; it also makes a very good small vessel for wooden spoons, dried flowers or a bunch of herbs hung to dry.

For a gift it is easy and specific: a baker, someone setting up a first kitchen, or anyone who likes their tools to have been made by a company that took its name from two towns.

A note on care, and it is the one rule that kills flour sifters. Never wash it, never soak it, and never put it in a dishwasher. Water gets into the seams and behind the screen where it cannot dry, and it rusts the mesh from the inside out; it will also lift a printed decal and swell a wooden handle off its rivets.

Clean it dry. Tap it out, brush the screen with a dry pastry brush, and leave it. If something sticky gets on the outside, wipe that spot with a barely damp cloth and dry it immediately, keeping the cloth off the decal.

Store it somewhere dry and open rather than sealed in a bag, sift only dry ingredients through it, and do not put the wooden handle near heat.