Until about two hundred years ago, it was common for cookbooks to instruct aspiring chefs to pour their stewed beef or sliced apples into a coffin. By coffin, however, they did not mean a burial casket but rather a pastry crust or a pie tin. This culinary use of coffin is, in fact, the original one, dating back to the early fifteenth century, whereas the corpse-box sense did not emerge until the early sixteenth century. Of course, as the funereal associations of coffin came to dominate the word, it gradually ceased to be used in relation to baking, this sense finally dying out in the mid eighteenth century. In origin, coffin derives from the Greek kophinos, meaning basket, which is also the source of the word coffer. Other vessels in common use hundreds of years ago include the pipkin and the pottle. A pipkin, as anyone in the sixteenth century would know, was a small earthenware pot, a miniature version of a wooden cask known as a pipe. In turn, the pipe, which held 105 imperial gallons, acquired its name from the simple fact that it was tall and cylindrical, like a plumbing pipe. A pottle, on the other hand, held half a gallon: one sixteenth century recipe involving a whole pig calls for an entire pottle of white wine. Like pipkin, the word pottle is a diminutive: it simply means little pot.