Estimated time:
10 min.

Ingredients: (Hit your return key to start a new line)
one copper-bottomed pot

one acidic item (lemon juice, vinegar...even pickle juice or ketchup! ;-)

salt

steel wool pad/scrubbee thang

Directions:
Make a paste of the acidic stuff and the salt. Rub this all over the bottom of that copper pot. Give it a li'l bit of time to work, but with a bit of time, and some rubbing, it should shine!

Other suggestions and comments:
This works best if you do it on a fairly regular basis. If the pot has blackened/baked on stuff that hasn't been touched in ages, you'll have to work at it harder.

If you've been squeezing lemons, the used lemon halves can be sprinkled inside, with salt, and you can scrub away.

Ketchup works well enough that I use it fairly often; one restaurant pouch of the stuff, with salt, will polish 2 copper pan bottoms, at nearly no cost! I just squirt some on, cover it w/salt, and get on with scrubbing it.

Of course, not having copper-bottomed pans is perhaps easiest of all ;-) but if you read this, it's probably too late 4 that...and they do look sort of nice on the pot rack. I am glad my entire rack o' pots isn't copper, though!!!