[Sca-cooks] pottery braziers, cooking in pottery

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Huette von Ahrens <ahrenshav at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Probably because a ceramic chaffing dish is documentably period while 
> a metal brazier probably isn't.

I can't speak for Christian Europe, but metal braziers were in use for centuries around Dar al-Islam. The name in Arabic is qanun. There are a number surviving in various museum collections. Generally a qanun is a rectangular metal box - brass or bronze in the ones i've seen - elevated on decorative legs (since the ones i've seen are from nobility) and with decorative metal work on the outside. I suspect these more elaborate ones were primarily used for heating rooms in cold drafty palaces.

Qanuns are also mentioned in cookbooks and rectangular metal qanuns appear in 16th c. Ottoman paintings.

I saw unglazed circular red clay ceramic qanuns in use to cook food in Morocco when i was there. One vendor set a gsaa - also red clay - on top of the qanun. Amazing how he kept boiling eggs in it, since that gsaa was not even as deep as the diameter of an egg.
--
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita