Other than that, I like the bucket's functionality. And all the great memories I have of buckets.
The first example is the classic pail. How often I remember, and this is back in the old days, when we would go to the hand pump to get a bucket of water. We then had a ladle, itself a miniature bucket, that we would drink from, and communally at that!
I suppose I may owe some of my immunity to disease now to my ignorantly taking in other people's germs all those years ago. Today, of course, I'd never drink from a pail that's been within 50 feet of someone else. Which means I might drop dead at any moment.
I also remember pans and things that do pretty much the same thing a bucket does. You pour water from one to the other and obviously the water doesn't know any difference. For water, anything that impedes its flow, from a drinking glass to the Hoover Dam is just a bucket or, more accurately, a bucket-like thing.
Grandma used to boil water in a pan like this. And next thing you knew, she'd be putting food in it, like macaroni or spaghetti. You can probably guess what came next: She'd cook it and we'd end up eating whatever it was.



For tea kettles, which the double bubble pot also could be, I prefer the single. It's easy to use and easy to understand. You're not getting tangled up in all the handles, jutting out like a bull's horns. You've got one pot, one handle; it's all very clean and efficient, like a single bed as opposed to bunks. You put the water in it, boil it, and pour it on your teabag. Or you could use an infuser and make your tea in a more zen-like way, which I like to do sometimes. I find that doing things in slow motion and very intentionally sometimes brings me back to basic sanity. Sometimes.

This looks like a camping pail. It's small enough to fit on a camp stove. It seems like Charlie Chaplin had one like this in The Gold Rush, so we're talking a very old design here. You've got a guy in the silent movies, in a ramshackle cabin, boiling his shoe (to eat) in one of the bigger pans, probably the second from the top, then making his coffee in a little pail like this. I know people aren't near as finicky about how their coffee is cooked when they're camping or in a ramshackle cabin. Because out there if you get grounds in it, you just spit them out.
I hope you enjoyed my bucket list and my personal memories.
No comments:
Post a Comment