Cleaning Copper Pots
Copper pots not only conduct heat for cooking evenly, they also bring beauty and nostalgia to the kitchen. Our favorites are the Revere Ware we grew up with. The original copper clad pans can be found all over America in thrift stores at a fraction of the cost online for restored, cleaned, or curated collections of these vintage pans.
Back in the 1970s, someone in our neighborhood learned that you could clean these copper pans with ketchup. I remember my mother and my aunt polishing the spaghetti pot with the stuff to prove to the husbands it was true. It worked fairly well, much to everyone’s surprise.
We like to invigorate this process by going straight to the acid in the ketchup. We use 100% distilled white vinegar. Soak for an hour or longer. The Gay Housewife® method also involves plenty of elbow grease so be prepared to scrub any thick cooked on-stains with steel wool.
Lovely!
