A short history of toasting
Masonic Toasts
Colonial Quills
Bawdy Toasts
Christmas Toast Williamsburg
18th century rule of dining
Hebrew: "לחיים" ("L'Chayyim") (to life, traditional Jewish toast)
History of Toasting
Colonial Drinking Vessels - NYT
IT is cider-making time in Connecticut, as well as throughout other northern parts of the country, as it has been since the first crop of apples was harvested in 17th-century New England.
Apple trees were among the first food-bearing plants brought here to help make life more bearable for those who considered themselves English no matter on which side of the Atlantic they chose to live. In an age when water was suspect - as well it should have been for only shallow wells were in use - any sweet juice that could be turned into fermented liquor was considered as necessary as it was popular. And cider - drunk sweet, allowed to harden and often turned into brandy -was the most popular colonial juice of all.
Drinking vessels from which to quaff the beverage were as diverse as the homes in which cider was made and served. The names by which those drinking vessels, all collected as valuable antiques now, originally were known, are equally diverse.
Large bowls in which drinks were mixed, including punch, flip and mulled cider, generally today are lumped together under the common name, punch bowl. And the large glasses, known as tumblers in the 18th century, today are seldom called anything but flip glasses by collectors. Flip, according to an 18th-century recipe, was a ''potation compounded of beer, gin, cider or other spirits and coarse sugar,'' warmed in a bowl by thrusting a heated piece of iron into the mixture.
Of all the colonial containers used to serve drink of any kind, perhaps the most popular were the small vessels known in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries as beakers, cans and mugs.
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Beaker, from a Middle English word for a drinking glass with a wide mouth, was used in the 17th century to describe a straight-sided container of silver, pewter, pottery or glass made with a flaring rim. Later, beakers were fashioned in bell shapes with low bases, and from 1760 to 1810 were made in ovoid or egg shapes.
A can or cann, to give it the popular colonial spelling, usually referred to a metal tumbler or handleless cup. Mug was the popular name, as it still is today, for any large, straight-sided cup with a handle and could be found made of wood, glass, silver, tin, pewter, or of earthenware or stoneware.
Today the word bottle generally is used to describe a glass or clear plastic container for any liquid. But in colonial times bottle meant any ''vessel proper to contain liquors, made of leather, glass, stone or wood.''
Bumper and brimmer were popular 18th-century names for glasses or cups used when making toasts. Collectors today usually refer to a glass with a heavy bottom, a type of bar or tavern glass, as a bumper. The term is derived from bump, and was used in the sense of knocking or thumping a glass on a table or a bar top for emphasis following a toast. But in his dictionary in 1806, Noah Webster said that a bumper was just another name for any glass ''filled with liquor to the brim.'' According to Webster, brimmer and bumper were synonymous.
Other common terms brought from Britain to the colonies to describe drinking vessels included biggin, for any small bowl or cup; bowl, for any small, round container, and blackpot or blackjack for a waxed or varnished leather tankard.
In 1755, Samuel Johnson described a tankard as ''a large vessel with a cover for strong drink.'' Among collectors today, tankards are thought of as drinking vessels made almost exclusively of silver or pewter. In early America, however, just as was customary in England, a tankard might have been made of a variety of materials, including wooden staves hooped together, leather, glass or earthenware. Originally, tankard was applied to a vessel holding three gallons; by the 18th century it signified a small but still good-sized drink container made with a handle and a lid. The phrase still heard today - ''He was tanked up'' - to describe the unfortunate drinker who has clocked more than his share, had exactly the same meaning in early New England as it has today.
The blackjack, known also as a leather bottle, was made of heavy leather made by steam in the shape of a tankard or flagon to which a handle, also of leather, was stitched. The jack was waxed or varnished for appearance' sake as well as to keep it from absorbing moisture. Some jacks were plain, others were decorated with silver rims and sometimes with inset monograms, also in silver.
Blackjacks were more popular in average homes in 17th and 18th century America than they had been in England, where they were considered instruments for use by the lower classes. Thus, John Haywood, giving a description of popular drinking vessels in 1635, wrote that ''other bottles we have of leather but they are used mostly among the shepherds and people of the country, which when the Frenchmen first saw they reported at their return into their own country that Englishmen drink out of their boots.''
Another type of container brought here by English country people was also easily made by the cooper (the carpenter who manufactured barrels and kegs) or by any householder who was handy with a whittling knife. That was the peg tankard or tankard made of wooden staves and bound round with hoops of hickory or other small, pliable green wood. The peg tankard originally was a two-quart ale measure or communal drinking pot or loving cup divided by pegs into eight drafts, and intended to be passed from one drinker to another in a tavern. Old English law, in an attempt to discourage intemperance, ordered pegs or pins fastened to the large tankards. Whoever drank beyond the peg or mark of a single draft was liable for punishment. Hence the phrase ''to take someone down a peg'' meant to subject a person to public shame. A peg's worth, incidentally, was eight ounces.
An equally popular name for the same type of wooden tankard was a hoop or hooped pot, also made of staves bound together. An 18th-century dictionary described such a vessel as a quart pot generally made with three hoops, and ''if three men were drinking, each would take his hoop or third portion.''
The hooped pot had a history that went back even further, however, for it was this style of flagon to which Shakespeare alluded when he wrote in King Henry VI, that in some future, happier times there would be ''seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny; the three-hooped pot shall have 10 hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer.''
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