What is this?

[echokilo]

Photo attached was taken at Shugborough Hall yesterday .... but what is it please?

http://www.photobox.co.uk/album/1355798054

[echokilo]

<iframe frameborder="0" style="width:150px;" src="http://www.photobox.co.uk/album/13557980
54"></iframe>



This loink should work if previous one doesn't x

[tenrec]

Is it for pulling teeth?

[Mosaic]

It is a sugar cutter, as the wealthy household would buy their sugar in large cone-shaped hard blocks. Think of how sugar can clog up at the bottom of a sugar basin - well that kind of thing but big enough to stand on a table-top.To use it, you broke sections off with the cutters then ground it up. Hence packets of 'ground sugar' nowadays.

[jno]

http://www.oldandinte...om/sugar-nippers.aspx

[boxtops]

It looks like an ancient cooking device - something like a cherry stoner?

[boxtops]

mosaic, I remember my mother buying salt in solid blocks like that - we chipped a bit off when we needed it. I remember wet days when I was about six, carving statues in the salt block!

[sandyRoe]

I was thinking it was a device to put pleats in servants starched cuffs. But a sugar cruncher looks more likely.

[jno]

it could also be a blackhead squeezer, boxtops

[sandyRoe]

they must have had some blackheads back in the olden days

[jno]

incidentally, that's where Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio got its name

http://en.wikipedia.o...Mountain_%28Brazil%29

Sugar often came in loaf form.

[boxtops]

go on then jno, explain how it works!

[jno]

errr... just rtfm, boxy!

[boxtops]

LOL, what, and work the device at the same time ?!

[sunny-dave]

Looks like something Mrs O has got lined up for Tony & Mopedboy ...

... I remember salt in blocks boxy, but can't remember the brand name - don't think it was Saxa and Cerebos was the one which made a big point that it was 'free running' - any ideas?

[echokilo]

Thanks everyone x

[Gabriel-Thorpe]

I'm with tenrec on this one, it seems more like a Primalistic way of pulling out teeth, for example Georgian Era - Victorian Era styled perhaps.

[FredPuli43]

It's for cutting sugar. The handle is raised to open it up, and brought down to cut the sugar.A kitchen in a grand house, or a grocer's shop would have one. It was only in the last century that anyone thought to sell sugar, salt, tobacco and other dry goods in packets marked by weight.