- Source: Pot boiler
- Source: Pot Boiler
- Source: Potboiler
In archaeology or anthropology, a pot boiler or cooking stone is a heated stone used to heat water - typically by people who did not have access to pottery or metal vessels.
In Archaeology
The term refers to a stone used to move heat from a fire to a vessel to raise the temperature of water in the vessel, including for cooking. The stone is heated in a fire or in embers. When hot enough, the stone is transferred into a vessel of water to heat the contents. The vessel may be metal (though this is uncommon, metal normally being tough enough to take direct heat from a fire) or pottery which is not of good enough quality to be directly exposed to the heat of the fire - or a wooden trough. In a pre-pottery context, the heating can be done by lining a pit with leather, leaves or clay, and then putting in the water followed by pot boilers directly into the vessel.
Such stones can be recognized because the repeated exposure to the heat of the fire followed typically by rapid chilling in water leads to great thermal stress on the stone's fabric due to the thermal expansion and contraction. This typically leads to partial glazing of the stone's surface and a fine network of cracks on the stone's surface (often described as "crazing"). Eventually the stone shatters. Individual fragments may be re-used until it becomes infeasible to manipulate the stone into and out of the fire, at which point the fragments are discarded and a new pot boiler (or many new ones) are acquired. Often the broken pot boilers are discarded into middens or domestic waste deposits, which on long-established sites can amount to many tonnes of material.
Reuse as building material is not impossible, but the typical small size of the fragments hinders this use.
= Identification
=Surface "crazing" is not restricted to pot boilers - hearth stones and the surrounds of fireplaces may also show the same structure. However, since a pot boiler needs to be manipulated into and out of the fire (typically in anthropological observations, using sticks of green wood) at arm's length, they start off weighing up to several kilogrammes, and shrink by fragmentation ; hearth stones and chimney liners are typically larger.
See also
Boiler
Fulacht fiadh
References
Pot Boiler is a 2007 album by The Verlaines on Flying Nun Records.
Track listing
All songs written by Graeme Downes except "Sunday in Sevastopol",
music by Graeme Downes, lyrics by David Kominsky.
"Midlife Crisis" – 3:19
"Stop Messing Around" – 2:58
"It's Easier to Harden a Broken Heart (than mend it)" – 4:56
"Don't Leave" – 3:16
"Forgive Thine Enemies (but don't forget their names)" – 3:03
"Tragic Boy" – 4:15
"Sunday in Sevastopol" – 5:11
"All Messed Up" – 3:29
"16 Years" – 3:01
"If You Can't Beat Them" – 4:10
"Real Good Life" – 4:00
Personnel
Graeme Downes
Darren Stedman
Russell Fleming
Paul Winders
Gary Valentine – Trumpet
Dan Bendrups – Trombone
Kevin A. Lefohn – Violin
Kate Hamilton – Viola
Greg Hamilton – Cello
Libby Hamilton – Backing vocals
Anthony Lander – Backing vocals
Dale Cotton – Mixing
Reviews
Review at muzic.net.nz
Review at A Jumped-up Pantry Boy
Review at New Zealand Listener
External links
Article and interview at NZ Musician
A potboiler or pot-boiler is a novel, play, opera, film, or other creative work of dubious literary or artistic merit, whose main purpose was to pay for the creator's daily expenses—thus the imagery of "boil the pot", which means "to provide one's livelihood." Authors who create potboiler novels or screenplays are sometimes called hack writers or hacks. Novels deemed to be potboilers may also be called pulp fiction, and potboiler films may be called "popcorn movies."
Usage
If a serious playwright or novelist's creation is deemed a potboiler, this has a negative connotation that suggests that it is a mediocre or inferior work.
= Historical examples
=In 1854 Putnam's Magazine used the term in the following sentence: "He has not carelessly dashed off his picture, with the remark that 'it will do for a pot-boiler'".
Jane Scovell's Oona: Living in the Shadows states that "...the play was a mixed blessing. Through it O'Neill latched on to a perennial source of income, but the promise of his youth was essentially squandered on a potboiler."
Lewis Carroll, in a letter to illustrator A. B. Frost in 1880, advises Frost not to spend his advance pay for his work on Rhyme? & Reason? lest he be forced to "do a 'pot-boiler' for some magazine" to make ends meet.
A 1980s reviewer for Time condemned the novel Thy Brother's Wife, by Andrew Greeley, as a "putrid, puerile, prurient, pulpy potboiler".
In the late 1990s, American author and newspaper reporter Stephen Kinzer wrote that reading a "potboiler" is "a fine form of relaxation but not exactly mind-expanding."
In an interview with Publishers Weekly, writer David Schow described potboilers as fiction that "stacks bricks of plot into a nice, neat line".
See also
Airport novel
Pot-Bouille, an 1882 novel by Émile Zola
Pulp fiction
References
Further reading
"Potboiler" at World Wide Words