My mom’s brother Chuck passed away a few months ago. Chuck was a passionate, gourmet cook and he left quite a legacy of pots and pans.
Chuck had no family of his own, so my mom had the task of organizing his small estate. April and I both received some of his cookware.
The copper pots are lovely, but they needed a little cleaning up, so I assembled a few supplies…
Here we have lemons, baking soda, salt and beer.
I began by pouring the beer into a tall glass.
To clean my copper pots, I am using a wheat beer… a Tallgrass wheat beer.
Spueeze a lemon wedge into your beer.
Please don’t skimp on the lemon… uh… it is for the cleaning.
Add a dash or two of salt. Everyone knows that the salt does all the scrubbing.
Take a healthy swig to determine if the mixture is correct for your cleaning purposes.
Do you feel clean now?
Good!
Then you can begin!
Pick up your first copper pot.
Cut another lemon slice and sprinkle salt on it.
Rub the salted lemon right onto the copper pot.
Layers of tarnish will immediately begin to disappear underneath the salty scrub.
It really is amazing how quickly it works.
If not all the tarnish disappears easily, you might want to make a simple paste.
Mix about a half cup of baking soda with about about a tablespoon of salt.
Squeeze in half a lemon.
The mixture will be very foamy and you might find yourself hearkening back to a certain junior high science experiment involving a volcanic eruption.
I used the ‘spent’ lemon as a scrubber and applied the mixture to the copper pot.
I was hoping that the pasty concoction would work to get rid of some of those stubborn spots.
About half way through the pots and pans, I ran out of lemons.
I also ran out of beer…
And my jeans, the table, the floor… everything was covered in pasty lemon juice.
But what are a few insufferable hardships in the light of shiny copper pots?!?
So, I subsituted vinegar for the lemons and made some more paste.
To amp up the scrubbing action, I applied the salt right to the pots.
You can see how the paste reacts with the copper turning the mixture green.
Once I got everything coated in the pasty mixture, I remembered I had some lemon juice in the back of the fridge.
I used the lemon juice as a rinse agent to wipe off the paste and to get one more layer of tarnish off the old pots.
Then I rinsed everything in warm water and let them dry.
The pots cleaned up very nicely.
I suppose I could get even more tarnish off of them if I wanted to, but I don’t mind a bit of ‘patina’.
Here’s a before shot…
And here’s an after shot.
Oooooooooh!
Fancy, shiny pots!
It’s too bad they don’t have a fancy, shiny cook to go with them!
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