Cambridge University Kettles

The letter below was published in Country Life on 4th July 1957. It was written by Enid Porter the curator, from 1947-1976, of the Museum of Cambridge, which was then known as the Cambridge and County Folk Museum. There is now an Enid Porter Room in the museum and she is much revered for her work and research into social history. I am writing to the museum to ask whether the kettle is still there.

EARLY KETTLES

Sir, - Your correspondent M Littledale, who writes of early kettles in your issue of June 20, may be interested in a kettle which is among the exhibits of this museum. Made of copper, it is shaped like half a beehive, the back being flat and provided with a hook to allow the kettle to be hung on the bars of the hob grates of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The handle is at right angles to the spout. Such kettles were commonly used by Cambridge undergraduates of the period when making tea in their rooms.

I have always imagined that the spouted kettle as we know it today was a fairly late development, and that the kettles referred to in early inventories were really pots. We still refer to "fish kettles," which certainly have no spouts. W Carew Hazlitt, in his book 'Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine', writes in the chapter 'Diet of the Yeoman and the Poor':

"The meat was usually boiled in a kettle suspended over a wood fire, such as is used only now, in an improved shape, for fish and soup. The kettle which is mentioned, as we observe, in the tale of 'Tom Thumb' was the universal vessel for boiling purposes." And he adds a footnote: "An inverted kettle was the earliest type of the diving-bell."

ENID M PORTER, Curator, The Cambridge and County Folk Museum, 2, Castle Street, Cambridge.