Friday 29 February 2008

The Footed Pot

Well, I went off and scrabbled around through some of my books. Of course, they're not sorted with an eye to identifying cookware, so this is what I could find quickly.


This is a picture from Food by Audrey Noel Hume, from the Colonial Williamsburg Archaeological Series. #9. The two large pots are from before 1797, when the house they were excavated from, burned down in Williamsburg.




The second picture is from Cooking at Jamestown Settlement, which oddly lists no author at all. The pot in the picture is being used in the living history interpretive section of the museum, the reconstructed settlement, so I imagine it is a reproduction, but much closer to the source, and likely to be reasonably accurate. (Somewhere we have more info on Jamestown. I'll have to figure out which library it's in.) Jamestown Settlement dates from 1607 to the mid-1620's.



The third picture is from A Taste of History, The Origins of Quebec's Gastronomy by Marc Lafrance and Yvon Desloges. Unfortunately they give no more specific credit for any of the photos than what's included with the picture. I'm assuming there's a good chance that this pot is part of the Louisbourg artefact collection. (Again, somewhere we have lots more photos from Louisbourg, but I'll have to hunt them down.)
The caption with this photo merely describes it as a pot style used in the 18th century. It is definitely a much more elegant casting than my reproduction. Thinner, not as rough.


I also have bookmarked, an interesting article on the history of cauldrons and cast iron:
http://filebox.vt.edu/users/jselmer/cauldrons.htm
And the author includes a picture of a similar kettle from his own collection as the last image:
http://filebox.vt.edu/users/jselmer/cauldrons.htm#fig_12

Interestingly to me, this shape of metal pot seems to follow the shape of earlier earthenware pots. Maybe I'll try ferreting out some pictures of those next....

v

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