SC - mountain mushrooms

[Balano1@aol.com]

Anne-Marie wrote,

> I certainly
>havent seen any flat lidded pots in the Museum collections, primary sources
>and other stuff I've been looking at. Again, I'd love to be proven wrong,
>but all the pots I've seen are the cauldron shape, with nicely domed lids
>(tricky to stack coals on) and a round bottom (tricky to control the heat
>on underneath).

This has bothered me for a while because some of the German sources
recommend placing hot coals both underneath and on top of the pot while it
cooks. Instead of doing all of the cooking in the fireplace, kitchens in
German-speaking Europe had a hearth raised about waist high where cooking
was done in pans placed on tripods or in pots or pans with three feet.
Coals could be added or removed from underneath to adjust the heat.

But most of the woodcuts show people cooking with uncovered pots and pans.
There are a few picture that look like the lids might be flat with handles,
rather than domed, but they never show coals on top. The pans and some of
the pots are flat bottomed with staight sides, not cauldron-shaped. There
are round bottomed cooking containers in both metal and clay, but they
aren't the only shape.

Recently I got a copy of Hofrichter and Grassnick's Deutsche historiche
Buergerhaeuser (German historical city houses) that shows the Albrecht
Durer's restored kitchen in Nuremberg. Great picture of the kitchen with a
metal pot on the hearth with a flat lid - no handle on the top. This could
easily have had coals placed on top as rcommended in the 16th recipes. No
rim around the edge, like a dutch oven, though.

Valoise


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