'Shackling up' was the term used amongst Irish building workers, apparently well in to the 1970's, for communal cooking - whether on site or in the bed-sits where the only available stove/cooker was on the landing outside the rooms.

Again, to my shame, I never thought to ask for the derivation - probably because I work by establishing a rapport and don't like to break the flow by asking awkward or pedantic peripheral questions. There is of course a happy medium...

I suspect that the term may originate with the construction of a system for suspending a cooking pot over an open (camp) fire...Shows how far removed we have all become, in a relatively short space of time, from certain ways of living whose elements stretch unbroken back to the Middle Ages. How un-free today's semingly well-padded youth are even compared with those of us who were young in the nineteen sixties!

Ultan