Reader Chris gave us this tip for keeping the copper bottoms clean:
Heat Campbell’s tomato soup in pan. Before washing, rub left over soup on the copper and let sit a few minutes. If one eats the soup every few weeks the copper looks better and better with almost no labor.
The Revere Ware vintage 4-quart pressure cooker, made during the 40’s and 50’s, is a great pressure cooker and we’ve sold quite a few replacement gaskets to people who want to keep them cooking decades more.
The biggest problem with these units is the lack of availability of over-pressure plugs in the lids. These plugs are made with a hole through them filled with solder that will blow out at a certain pressure. Once the over-pressure plug is blown, it is done and needs to be replaced with another.
One possibility is to convert the pressure cooker to use an over pressure plug that is still available. Specifically, Revere Ware’s model 1574 and 1576 pressure cookers use a simple rubber plug that fits in a 12mm hole in the lid. These plugs are identical to Presto part 09915.
In theory, converting the vintage pressure cooker to use the new style plug should be easy – just drill out the hole for the current over pressure plug with a 12mm metal drill bit. The vintage 4-quart pressure cooker has an operating pressure up to 15 lbs and the 157x models work up to 17.5 lbs.
Below are some comparison pictures between the vintage 4-quart and the 1574.
If anyone is going to attempt this conversion, please send us pictures and let us know the outcome.
As with anything pressure cooker related, we advise that you use caution.
We occasionally get inquiries about a newer Revere pressure cooker, made and sold during the 1990’s (as best we can tell). Because there is no model number on the unit, and really no other info that might identify it properly, it is extremely hard to find any info about this pressure cooker on the internet.
We managed to find one of these new-in-box with the manual, so have gathered a bit of information on them.
This style seems to have come in 3 and 6 quart varieties that differed only in height. Please visit our information page on that pressure cooker for all the information we have on that model, including the manual.
Revere Ware (aka World Kitchen) sells very few lids anymore for their copper bottom style cookware. Our latest check shows two lids, a 10″ and one listed as fitting 2 and 3 quart saucepans. For owners of vintage cookware, specifying lids by capacity means little as the sizes varied over the years for a given capacity.
By far the best places to get replacement lids for your copper bottom cookware are your local thrift store, where you can often find a large selection of lids, or Ebay, if you want to find a very specific size. As of this writing, Ebay lists about 100 lids at auction.
We’ve created a site, revereware.org that sorts all Revere Ware listings on Ebay sorted by type and size, and you can find all the lids here.
To find the right lid for your cookware, choose a size that is listed with measurements the same size or slightly smaller than the inside diameter of your cookware. Revere Ware lids are usually just slightly smaller than the cookware they fit. Ebay listers will show this as anywhere from 1/16″ to 1/4 inch smaller than your cookware diameter.
Very few Revere Ware pots in our experience have a diameter that is NOT a whole inch; exceptions we have found include a 6 1/4″ skillet (that takes a 6″ lid) and 5 1/2″ saucepans. However, based on auction listing we’ve seen, there do appear to be 6.5″ and 7.5″ sizes as well.
For example, lids listed measuring 5.25 (5 1/4), 5.3125 (5 5/16), 5.375 (5 3/8), 5.4375 (5 7/16), and 5.5 (5 1/2) inches are all probably the same size measured slightly differently by different sellers and should all fit a sauce pot with a 5.5″ inside diameter.
A customer recently send us these photos of a skillet with extra handle and domed lid, wondering what the official name for this piece of cookware is. If you know what this is called, please let us know in the comments or email us here.
When I first became interested in Revere Ware and started looking for replacement parts (which led me to start this business), a guy named Charlie Anjard ran The Shine Shop, a business that restored cookware to almost new. Charlie was extremely helpful and always willing to answer the odd question. He has unfortunately closed his business due to health reasons, but in the time Charlie ran his business, he was very active in tracking down the history of the Revere Ware company and the geneology of their products, and he compiled all his work in what he called the Revere Info Center. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that most of what we know about the history or Revere Ware’s products is due to Charlie’s work.
Unfortunately Charlie’s original site is offline now, but we archived a copy which you can find here. One of the most helpful pages is the photo guide to Revere products over the years.
I occasionally see some colored Revere Ware handles and knobs on Ebay and they typically sell for slightly above what you might pay for our black replacement Bakelite parts. But this recent auction for yellow handles and knobs really has me scratching my head.
Selling for a whopping $362, I can’t imagine why these parts were considered so valuable by several different bidders. Certainly colored parts are rare, but is it really worth almost $400 to have colored Bakelite handles on some of your Revere Ware cookware?
There is another set listed as well.
We’ve had a rash of emails from people looking for replacement weights for their 1970’s era Revere Ware pressure cookers that look like this:
(You can find all of our accumulated information for this model here.)
These pressure cookers use a weight similar in shape and size to a standard Revere Ware lid knob to regulate the pressure which was alternately called the “pressure control regulator” or the “pressure control knob.” While I seem to recall that different weighted control knobs were available that were calibrated to different pressures, our manual for these pressure cookers indicates only a single weight that is calibrated for 17 1/2 lbs of pressure.
If you are unlucky enough to lose your pressure control knob, your pressure cooker is good as a doorstop, not much else, as replacements aren’t available anywhere we are aware of. For the enterprising DIYer that might want to make or have a replacement made, here are the important dimensions of the part:
Weight: 6.1 oz
Material: Brass
The inside of the hole is a very specific shape, shown here thanks to Playdoh.
The diameter of the largest part of the weight is 1.75 in or 44 mm.
Please let us know (and send us pictures) if you’ve successfully made your own replacement.
A customer sent us this photo. It is the first time I’ve seen a double imprint of the vintage Revere Ware process patent stamp on the bottom of a piece of cookware.
Update 6/20/16: We’ve since seen some auctions for double-struck stamp pieces. This seems to indicate the value for pieces like this is relatively low, at least in the eyes of the sellers. These pieces tend to list for about that much even without the double-struck stamp.
It is hard to be a Revere Ware fan and miss Ebay as probably the best place to get good quality vintage Revere Ware cookware these days to fill-out one’s collection or replaced a lost or damaged piece. Some time ago we created a site to categorize all the listings for Revere Ware on Ebay (www.revereware.org). The number of revere ware listings on Ebay continues to grow, as evidenced by our tracking of the number of pieces available over the last two years.
(We had a small bug that kept us from recording numbers above 1,000, which is why the top of the graph is flat.)
Ebay seems to have made some recent changes that make it easier to find Revere Ware (and probably many other) items. First, when searching on “revere ware” Ebay now includes results from “revereware” (i.e. no space) as well. This is helpful as items are often listed in as one or the other but not both. Second, Ebay searches for keywords like “revere ware” now show up in Google results.
