Potboilers

When the first seafarers came upon American Indians boiling their meats in vessels of bark or wood, into which they had dropped hot stones, they would have been less astonished than we because they would have recognized the ancient British potboiler. The same hot-stone method that originated in neolithic Britain continued there in remote areas into the eighteenth century. “Otherwise being destitute of vessels of metal or earth, they put water into a block of wood, made hollow with the help of the dirk and burning,” a Captain Edward Butt observed of some remote island Scotsmen in the 1720s, “and then with pretty large stones heated red-hot, and successively quenched in that vessel, they keep the water boiling, till they have dressed their food.”