[Sca-cooks] Hampton Court copper kettle
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Tue Dec 5 03:25:02 PST 2006
On Dec 5, 2006, at 2:25 AM, Stefan li Rous wrote:
> Maire mentioned:
> <<< The most memorable piece I recall was this absolutely massive,
> huge copper
> boiling kettle that was quite a bit taller than I am, and which people
> needed to use these little built-in stairs to access the top of. >>>
>
> The stairs were built into the copper kettle? Or do you mean the site
> had some extra stairs built so the tourists could look into the
> kettle?
Or maybe the design of the manor included stairs next to the kettle
so the original cooks/brewers/generic fire users could access it?
> Why would they need that large of a kettle? What would they have used
> it for? Although it sounds like it would make a nifty hot tub.
If it were essentially the hot water heater for a large house (in
some ways not unlike the gas or oil-heated hot water heater you might
find in the basement of a large house today), I'd expect it to be
huge, especially in a house without central heating and at least
sometimes housing, possibly, over a hundred residents and staffers.
It's conceivable that this hot water was used for bathing and laundry
as well as cooking, isn't it?
Adamantius
"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils mangent de la
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them
eat cake!"
-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
"Confessions", 1782
"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry
Holt, 07/29/04
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