How do we know that the saying originally developed about cast-iron pots? There are many other types. What they all have in common is that they get blackened by soot.
The National Association of Bed Wetters United would like to have a word with you…
Yep. Except for the idea that many poor people got a regular source of iron via things cooked in their cast iron pots, since they couldn’t afford meat very often if at all. I believe that most people owned at least one cast iron pot, only the exceptionally poor didn’t have a cast iron cooking pot.
ETA: your point still stands, even cast iron is black whether it’s with soot or not. 
Anecdote warning!
My maternal grandmother had brown eyes, wavy hair and full lips. The kind of full lips that Angelina Jolie and Steven Tyler would look at and say “da-yum! Girl, lay off the collagen before they explode!” (She was also D.A.R. and into geneology about 40 years before Roots.)
Her sister-in-law made a comment about a nigger in the woodpile before the wedding in 1942 and “explained” it to me (after commenting on my exceedingly Irish appearance with a comment about how “at least no one can tell anymore”) in 1984. In my extended hissy-fit about that conversation, I verified that my late-baby-boomer, college kid-from-across-the-country, as well as my parents’ WASP, barely-pre-and-early-babyboomer peers understood the phrase to mean exactly what Auntie had intended for 42 1/2 years.
Maybe not the 1852 meaning, but after WWI at least some people used it to explicitly mean “one of your white female ancestors screwed around on her hubby with a black guy, and you’re too sneaky/dumb to admit/realize it.”
I have heard it used just that way. And “the woodpile” would be a place for a black suitor to hide from a jealous husband.
Yeah, but who had a cast iron kettle? Did such things even exist?
Appropriate t-shirt hell shirt:
I am not sure if cast iron kettles existed. Would copper or brass have cost more? Anyway, the saying still makes sense if the kettle was well worn copper or brass, and the pot well worn cast iron doesn’t it? 
They’d both be black, (And at the time the saying came into being from the soot, to boot. Even today it is still effective as a saying, since cast iron blackens with use, as does other cookware.) it’s just that one could be polished up and be shiny for a short time. The kettle is still pointing out a flaw in another which it also bears.
I’m pretty sure that the term kettle has a broader definition than the one that boils water for tea on your stove top. I always thought a witch’s cauldron was a kettle, and they always seem to be made from cast iron.
Note the definition of cauldron in the kettle wikipedia article.
As a cultural aside, The equivalent expression in Venezuela is “Cachicamo diciendole a morrocoy conchudo” which translates to “Armadillo calling the tortoise hard shelled”
“Cat in a meal tub”? This makes no sense, unless the cat burrows in after mice (?!)
Or is it a caterpillar?
Only if you’re being niggardly about the situation.
I thought the “woodpile” part meant that even though one of the ancestors was black, since we don’t talk about it/try to deny it, they weren’t included in the “family tree”.
I’ve also heard white people in the US mention that they had “an indian in the woodpile” when recounting their ancestor’s national origin.
I don’t know. My guess as to the origin of the “woodpile” phrase was just that – a guess-- based upon the usage.
That reminds me of a quote supposedly said by presidential brother and Billy Carter. It’s been a looooong time, and I couldn’t find a citation online, but basically (IIRC), Billy was talking to a Black chap whose name was also “Carter.” The Black chap made some comment that “We might be related!” Billy responded something like, “Maybe so. . . there’s a nigger in everybody’s woodpile.” (An if this story is apocryphal, it was a contemporary apocryphal story.)
Well, that’s a fine kettle of fish!
IIRC, household vessels were more often made of copper than iron pre-Industrial Revolution, as copper is easier to beat into shape (cast iron, of course, can’t be shaped that way at all). One of the effects of industrialisation was to make ironware cheaper.
I have one of these on my pellet stove.
That’s what I get for avoiding our relatives as much as possible - I miss all the good stuff. Fairly sure they’d have handed me a shotgun and shooshed me out the door if I ever tried to carry on a conversation with them anyway, but still…
While anyone with a functioning eyeball would suspect some Spanish or Mexican ancestry after seeing our aunt, we look like we just came over from Donegal (those of us that don’t live in California and still maintain a ghostly pallor, anyway )
[hijack]
What people suspect about that particular aunt’s ancestry is determined solely by the suspectors point-of-view and awareness of the relationship. I’ve had acquaintences from Greek, French, Middle Eastern, American Indian and Italian neighborhoods ask if she was “part” Greek, French, Middle Eastern, American Indian or Italian. We’re the super pale twig on that branch of the family.
BTW – the one of us who does live in California just happens to be the redhead who tends to freckle when she so much as hears the word “sunshine.” I don’t “tan” any better than do, you goof, it’s just that I used to make my freckles reach maximum density. 
[/hijack]
Heh, my mom (Mexican-American) has been asked by various people if she was a Muslim, because she didn’t “look Mexican” (possibly because she doesn’t ever go outside and thus doesn’t have any real kind of tan). She also tends to get randomly searched at airports a lot when traveling overseas, but she says she just considers it another hassle of traveling by plane, up there with the over-salty peanuts and the brat who invariably sits behind you and kicks the back of your seat for four and a half hours.
Meanwhile, a black friend of mine says that she’s not African American. She’s Irish. With one HUGE freckle.