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)
“Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behaviour perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)