Boiled leather, sometimes called cuir bouilli, was a historical construction material for armour. It consists of thick leather, boiled in water (some sources hold that oil and wax were used as well; others posit the use of ammonia from fermented animal urine). The boiling causes the leather to be harder but also more brittle. The boiled leather can be fashioned into lames or scales to make lamellar or scale armor. The leather remains flexible for a short time after boiling, allowing it to be molded into larger plates.
Cuir bouilli has also been employed to bind books.
Famous quotes containing the words boiled and/or leather:
“Surely, of all creatures we eat, we are most brutal to snails. Helix optera is dug out of the earth where he has been peacefully enjoying his summer sleep, cracked like an egg, and eaten raw, presumably alive. Or boiled in oil. Or roasted in the hot ashes of a wood fire.... If God is a snail, Bosch’s depictions of Hell are going to look like a vicarage tea-party.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“In the case of all other sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, everyone is convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learning and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, there seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and last, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)