CHAPTER X

POTS AND PANS

GEORGE ANSON's mother made lovely butter. There was a room just outside the kitchen all fitted up with wooden rack shelves, tier above tier, where she set the pans of milk for the cream to rise. There was always such a fine, clean, sweet creamy odor in the milk room that George used to feel like a better boy, if he just stepped inside. But that didn't really follow, for once his sisters hid the cookies in a twoquart pail, inside a four-quart pail, inside a six-quart pail, inside a ten-quart pail underneath the skimming table in the milk room. George found them there, as his sisters soon realized. They opened his Bible to the place in Proverbs where it says: "Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant." This, however, was too delicate a reproof to be very efficacious with a hungry-always hungry-boy.

Another happy association with the milk room was the cider apple sauce barrel that stood just by the door between the milk room and the kitchen. It's many years since George Anson dug a bowlful of frozen cider apple sauce out of that barrel, but he remembers well how delicious it was along with the heaping great

yellow "nappy" full of doughnuts that never failed to be fried of a Saturday afternoon. Every autumn the family had a regular apple-cutting bee, when they quartered ten bushels of sweet apples and three bushels of "Baldwins." These were stewed all day long in a great, brightly scoured brass "set kettle" with cider which had been boiled down out-of-doors, four measures into one. The juicy, tangy, brown cider apple sauce would two-thirds fill the forty-gallon barrel that was set by the milk room door. Every meal, morning, noon, and night, a bowlful came on the table. Better and better it grew as it froze and thawed, till when summer came and fresh wild strawberries, blueberries and blackberries were ready to take its place, even these delicacies hardly made one forget the good old stand-by of winter time.

But we started this story in the milk room among the many pans where the cream was rising. There was another pile of pans that couldn't be used because they had begun to leak a little. As soon as young Anson grew big enough it was one of his jobs to mend these pans. Later on in life he had the luxury of gasoline blowtorches and Bunsen burners to heat the soldering copper. But on an old-fashioned New England farm, at least up to the time he had his homemade forge, George had to be contented with the wood fire in the cookstove.

Soldering requires a clean, bright, well-tinned copper, hot enough to make the solder flow like water, so that as it cools it will cool smooth like the ice on

a pond, not all rough like a muddy road after a freeze. A dirty-looking, oxidized, soldering copper can't be heated enough to make a good job. The first thing to do with it is to put it in the vise and file away at the point right down to the bright copper, so that there will be four clean faces each as big as your thumbnail to be brightly tinned.

A fine auxiliary device is a piece of board, about four inches square, covered with a piece of tin, and on the tin some rosin and solder. With this device available it's easy to keep the soldering copper brightly tinned. It has only to be rubbed when hot on this rosin-solder surface. But after it has just been newly filed the heat may tarnish the bright copper surface, and if so the file should be handy to clean this tarnish off just before rubbing the block.

But now the copper is in fine condition. How about the solder? It comes in heavy bars, that take large coppers to melt. In order to really enjoy a job of soldering you must first melt up one of these bars in a ladle, or even a cup-shaped sheet iron melting pot, and pour the solder in rows along a cold iron or stone plate, so that it will form thin strips each about a half-inch wide. With these a big copper is unnecessary for light soldering like mending pans.

What shall we use to make the solder flow and stick? Nowadays nearly everybody buys soldering paste that looks like wagon grease. But rosin is just as good for tin or brass, and is cleaner to handle, and gives a more permanent job. The rosin can first be rubbed

onto the work so as to leave a little of its dust behind. But for iron, or galvanized iron, it's useless to use rosin, or sometimes even paste for flux. One must dissolve tin in muriatic acid and use this on such iron surfaces.

Young Anson would hold up his mother's milk pan toward the light, and soon see a tiny pinhole somewhere. With a knife blade he would scratch the pan bright for a half-inch all around the hole, and rub on a piece of rosin. Meanwhile, the soldering copper was heating on the coals of the kitchen stove, with the door open just so the wooden handle could be outside. When it grew hot enough, the copper was quickly wiped with an old rag, rubbed on the tin block, and in a moment a smooth little lake of solder would be melted over the offending hole.

Granite ware

But it's not only tin pans that leak. dishes will sooner or later develop small holes. Everybody's pantry has some of those granite ware pans, kept because they look too good to throw away, with just one little hole in the corner. When George grew older this problem came up, too, and it's not every person of womankind that can see why it is that a granite ware dish doesn't mend with a soldering copper, like a tin pan. The secret is that the solder just won't

stick to granite ware.

What's to be done? The first thing is to take the shank end of a file and make the hole round, and not less than an eighth of an inch in diameter. Then take a bit of solder, or preferably of lead, because it

melts at a higher temperature, and whittle out a little rough rivet that can be screwed halfway through the hole. Then rest the large end of the rivet on a smooth iron of some sort, and head down the small end with a hammer. By and by, turn the pan over and head down the big end also with the hammer. Such a job will last a long while, unless the cook lets the dish get hot enough to melt the rivet.

But, you say, that will happen every time she sets the dish on the blaze. George used to think so, too, until one day his old uncle showed him a wonderful little experiment. He made a little boat-shaped dish of white birch bark. This he half filled with water, and taking the birch bark dish in the tongs, set it carefully right on a bed of coals in the open fireplace. "Why! you will put the fire out," said George. "Watch and see," said his uncle.

The birch bark took fire at once and burned briskly until it reached the water, and then the blaze hissed and went out. Soon the water began to boil, for all of the lower part of the dish was kept so cool by the water that not even the bright coals could burn it through.

So when the cook uses a mended granite ware dish to boil or stew anything that has water in it, the rivet never gets hot enough to melt, even if it is directly over the flame. But if the water boils away, then there will soon be a pan that needs remending.