Welcome to The Copper Pot
A scrapbook of recipes and stories about everyday kitchen objects, with Jack Hanlon and Angelos Angelides (illustrations by Lena)
Welcome to our Substack about things in the kitchen. We’ll focus on different objects and share original recipes, personal reflections, and archival stories. From stacks of Tupperware boxes to vintage salad spinners; industrial pressure cookers to Ferrari pizza ovens. You can expect some delicious recipes alongside historical snippets and cultural oddities.
Who we are
We’ve been cooking and eating together for a decade and have each worked in and around food in London for much of that time. This Substack grows out of a shared love of food and a fascination with the tools of cooking.
Jack
A cook and a historian, I’ve spent much of the last 5 years researching the 19th/20th century history of London’s wholesale meat market, Smithfield. I’ve been working with the London Museum as they prepare to open a new site in the former Victorian food market. I also work as a chef at Pritchard and Ure at the Camden Garden Centre. It’s a nice combination. Apart from when you get stopped at the entrance to the British Library with a roll of kitchen knives tucked into your laptop bag …
In fact, it was on one such (successful) trip that the shape of this Substack began to come into focus. Sitting under the spacious atrium of Humanities 1, I was browsing through a catalogue of butcher’s equipment from the 1950s - page after page of intricate illustrations of ham stands, sausage trays, and cleavers.
As a historian these are the kinds of documents that get stuck in your head, rattling around and refusing to leave. Ham stands? Really? Recalling a brilliant blog about sharpening tools by the historian Paul Warde , I began to think about how little we talk about the things that we cook with. Archaeologists can reconstruct the cooking and eating habits of whole civilisations by looking at pots and pans that are left behind. Yet with contemporary food culture the problem is often the opposite; there’s too much information rather than too little. Reels, blogs, and books blurring into an indeterminate noise. When all is said and done, though, our food cultures are still bound by the tools we use. The material culture of the kitchen still tells us a lot about the way we cook and eat.
Angelos
On a recent trip to Paris I found myself in a cookware shop (yes it was E. Dehillerin) surrounded by copper pots and pans way out of my price range. Leaving sad and (almost) empty handed, I dreamt about the day I could add all the weird and wacky kitchen implements I’d come across to my already weird and wacky kitchen collection.
Having worked in busy kitchens for years, I’d seen the standard bits of equipment, but have also come to appreciate the quirks of each. Cooking fish low and slow over logs using specially made “fish-cages”, steaming dumplings using a giant steamer basket that everyone seemed to burn their arms on, blenders that would only blend for 30 seconds before turning off. Warm cupboards full of electrical equipment that we would ferment in, electrical outlets that made ovens run temperamentally, gas burners stuck on full blast - the space and equipment used heavily influence what was being cooked. There are kitchens in which the whole menu has to revolve around the fact that there is no working extractor; gentle concise cooking, no heavy frying or grilling.
In my recent move to the world of recipe development, I now get to cook with a more domestic range of implements, which in itself has its own quirks and oddities. Unfortunately, my kitchen still doesn’t have a copper pot, but maybe one day…
A scrapbook / archive
In short, we want this Substack to read a bit like a scrapbook, or ‘commonplace book.’ Alongside our recipes and reflections we’ll send you bits of writing by other people and links to films or exhibitions. We will also have some beautiful illustrations and designs (see logo!) from our talented friend Lena. Over time, we want The Copper Pot to develop into an archive, with clusters of recipes, images, and stories, tucked into every corner of the kitchen.
The first installment concerns an over-sized steamer stack and it'll be landing in your inbox tomorrow. Enjoy!