Knott’s Pop-Corn Kettle

Copper kettle, 19 inches in diameter by 17 inches deep, with single grip handles.

Special sizes. If you want them tell us.

Made light for lifting, but especially strong and durable to stand the stirring of pop-corn.

Weight about 14½ pounds.

Knott’s kettle is the right one to use for all around factory pop-corn work. It is the style used in the pop-corn factories of New England, because they find this method requires the least labor and because it uses less candy to cover the corn. It enables you to cook the candy higher than other methods and thus increases the keeping quality of the pop-corn confection.

You boil your syrup in this kettle. Because you are boiling for each batch less than a gallon of stock, it is not convenient when working fast to use a thermometer. Pop-corn makers use one of four tests, according to their experience in the business. 1.—The so-called “water test,” half a teaspoonful of syrup dropped in cold water. 2.—The test by the color of the syrup. 3.—The test by how it leaves the paddle when scooped up on it. It will string off or come off in lumps, so-called “ragging off the paddle.” 4.—A test by the steam or smoke which rises from the kettle.

You are advised to get a confectioner’s thermometer and make the other tests at the same time you use the thermometer, doing it with syrup over a slow fire and in that way learn how the syrup you finally determine to use will act at the temperature you require.

Practical experience is the one way to learn. Do not expect to make a good batch the first time nor the third time, but you need have no discouragement if you have not reached perfect results on your twelfth batch.

In beginning, you are likely to cook candy too high to be easily worked into shape.

Efficient pop-corn making is not to be learned very easily; it comes with practice.

When you are running on one kind of pop-corn as a specialty so that you want to get out one batch after another as fast as possible, it is well to use two fires and two kettles. One kettle with syrup may be warming up while you are boiling the other.

You will find it well to use a cover on your kettle, part of the time, one of Stock No. [2005-1], or one that you can make yourself out of thin wood. The object is to let the condensing steam run down and thus clean the sides of the kettle.

Copper or wood covers are best, an iron cover rusts out quickly.

These covers will last you a long time because they are of heavy material and handle riveted with copper rivets.