This story tells of a 2400 year old pot of soup discovered in China. 

http://www.aolnews.com/2010/12/14/2-400-year-old-pot-of-soup-found-in-chinese-tomb/19759753

The archaeologists that discovered the soup are calling their find a "pot" (or at least the chinese translation thereof).

Could they have called it a kettle of soup?  Yes, but that would be another kettle of fish.

People often come up asking me for Tea Kettles or Coffee Pots or Coffee Kettles or Tea Pots.  These days they are interchangable but in the 18th Century they meant different things.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the following thusly:

kettle:
"A vessel, commonly of metal, for boiling water or other liquids over a fire"

pot:
"A vessel of this kind (now usually one of metal with a handle or handles) used in cooking. Hence: such a vessel and its contents."

Why would someone in the 18th century make it a point to differentiate, as in this citation from Daniel Defoe's · The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe · 1st edition, 1719:
"I had not so much as a Pot to boil any Thing, except a great Kettle."

And if we were to look it up in the Dictionary of English Language by Samuel Johnson in 1755:
"In the kitchen the name of pot is given to the boiler that grows narrower towards the top, and of kettle to that which grows wider."

Historically, if you went to a coffee house they would be brewing coffee in large cast iron kettles that remained over the fire and the liquid was transfered into servers such as the Coffee pot I sell, based on the one shown in the delftware tiles at the Guildhall Museum in London.

Colonial Williamsburg used the delft tiles as the inspiration for the sign at the Charlton Coffee House.

Next post I will try to explain the difference between a tea pot and a coffee pot.