On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, Steve Mynott wrote:
>Ken Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>On a tangent a friend claimed Americans didn't have electric kettles
>for boiling water.
>
>Can anyone confirm whether this is true?
sigh. Americans tend not to call something a "kettle" unless it's
large, at least a 6-qt capacity. We don't have non-specialized
electric cooking vessels in that size on the market.
However, we have electric coffeepots that size and larger, and
electric "hotpots" of a smaller size (around 2qt) suitable for
heating water to brew tea, and electric "rice cookers" of
approx. 3-4qt capacity that are entirely suitable for boiling
water if you don't want to cook rice.
I'd be inclined to think that this is just a terminology issue.
>I think "furnace" is "boiler" in English.
Hm. Not all furnaces are boilers. Basically we use the word
"furnace" here to mean the heating unit for a house. One kind
of furnace is a boiler, which heats liquid that then gets
circulated through radiators.
Other types of furnaces are electrical, or fired by gas, coal,
oil, or wood. Sometimes they heat a gigantic rock that then
radiates heat for days (this arrangement is popular in arid
northern and northwestern states). More often they heat air,
channeled through a heat-exchanger by a fan and then circulated
directly through the rest of the house via ductwork.
Actual boiler-type furnaces are quite rare in the US, and
I haven't seen a coal-fired furnace since I was a child.
They're still out there, though; although they are now illegal
for pollution reasons here in CA, there are places in the
midwest where once in a while you still find them in use.
Bear