Home Life in Colonial Days

by Alice Morse Earle

It should be stated that the word porringer, as used by English collectors, usually refers to a deep cup with a cover and two handles, while what we call porringers are known to these collectors as bleeding-basins or tasters. Here we apply the term taster, or wine-taster, to a small, shallow silver cup with bosses in the bottom to reflect the light and show the color and quality of wine. I have often seen the item wine-taster in colonial inventories and wills, but never bleeding-basin; while porringers were almost universal on such lists. Some families had a dozen. I have found fifteen in one old New England farmhouse. The small porringers are sometimes called posnets, which is an old-time word that may originally have referred to a posset-cup.

"Spoons," says the learned archæologist, Laborde, "if not as old as the world, are as old as soup." All the colonists had spoons, and certainly all needed them, for at that time much of their food was in the form of soup and "spoon-meat," such as had to be eaten with spoons when there were no forks. Meat was usually made into hashes or ragouts; thick stews and soups with chopped vegetables and meats were common, as were hotch-pots. The cereal foods, which formed so large a part of English fare in the New World, were more frequently boiled in porridge than baked in loaves. Many of the spoons were of pewter. Worn-out pewter plates and dishes could be recast into new pewter spoons. The moulds were of wood or iron. The spoon mould of one of the first settlers of Greenfield, Massachusetts, named Martindale, is here shown with a pewter spoon. In this mould all his spoons and those of his neighbors were cast. It is now in the Deerfield Memorial Hall.

A still more universal spoon material was alchymy, also called occamy, alcamy, arkamy, etc., a metal never used now, which was made of a mixture of pan-brass and arsenicum. Wooden spoons, too, were always seen. In Pennsylvania and New York laurel was called spoonwood, because the Indians made pretty white spoons from that wood to sell to the colonists. Horn was an appropriate and available material for spoons. Many Indian tribes excelled as they do to-day in the making of horn spoons. The vulgar affirmation, "By the great horn spoon," has perpetuated their familiar use.

Every family of any considerable possessions or owning good household furnishings had a few silver spoons; nearly every person owned at least one. At the time America was settled the common form of silver spoon in England had what was known as a baluster stem and a seal head; the assay mark was in the inner part of the bowl. But the fashion was just changing, and a new and much altered form was introduced which was made in large numbers until the opening reign of George I. This shape was the very one without doubt in which many of the spoons of the first colonists were made; and wherever such spoons are found, if they are genuine antiques, they may safely be assigned a date earlier than 1714. The handle was flat and broad at the end, where it was cleft in three points which were turned up, that is, not toward the back of the spoon. This was known as the "hind's-foot handle." The bowl was a perfectly regular ellipse and was strengthened by continuing the handle in a narrow tongue or rat-tail, which ran down the back of the bowl. The succeeding fashion, in the early part of the eighteenth century, had a longer elliptical bowl. The end of the handle was rounded and turned up at the end, and it had a high sharp ridge down the middle. This was known as the old English shape, and was in common use for half a century. About the period of our Revolutionary War a shape nearly like the one in ordinary present use became the mode; the bowl became egg-shaped, and the end of the handle was turned down instead of up. The rat-tail, which extended down the back of the bowl, was shortened into a drop. Apostle spoons, and monkey spoons for extraordinary use were occasionally made, and a few are still preserved; examples of five types of spoons are shown from the collection of Edward Holbrook, Esq., of New York.

Families of consequence had usually a few pieces of silver besides their spoons and the silver salt. Some kind of a drinking-cup was the usual form. Persons of moderate means often owned a silver cup. I have seen in early inventories and lists the names of a large variety of silver vessels: tankards, beer-bowls, beakers, flagons, wine cups, wine bowls, wine cans, tasters, caudle-cups, posset-cups, dram-cups, punch-bowls, tumblers, mugs, dram bottles, two-eared cups, and flasks. Virginians and Marylanders in the seventeenth century had much more silver than New Englanders. Some Dutch merchants had ample amounts. It was deemed a good and safe investment for spare money. Bread-baskets, salvers, muffineers, chafing-dishes, casters, milk pitchers, sugar boxes, candlesticks, appear in inventories at the end of the century. A tankard or flagon, even if heavy and handsome, would be placed on the table for every-day use; the other pieces were usually set on the cupboard's head for ornament.

The handsome silver tankard owned by Sarah Jansen de Rapelje is here shown. She was the first child of European parents born in New Netherland. The tankard was a wedding gift from her husband, and a Dutch wedding scene is graven on the lid.

There was a great desire for glass, a rare novelty to many persons at the date of colonization. The English were less familiar with its use than settlers who came from Continental Europe. The establishment of glass factories was attempted in early days in several places, chiefly to manufacture sheet-glass, but with slight success. Little glass was owned in the shape of drinking-vessels, none used generally on the table, I think, during the first few years. Glass bottles were certainly a great rarity, and were bequeathed with special mention in wills, and they are the only form of glass vessel named. The earliest glass for table use was greenish in color, like coarse bottle glass, and poor in quality, sometimes decorated in crude designs in a few colors. Bristol glass, in the shape of mugs and plates, was next seen. It was opaque, a milky white color, and was coarsely decorated with vitrifiable colors in a few lines of red, green, yellow, or black, occasionally with initials, dates, or Scriptural references.

Though shapes were varied, and the number was generally plentiful, there was no attempt made to give separate drinking-cups of any kind to each individual at the table. Blissfully ignorant of the existence or presence of microbes, germs, and bacteria, our sturdy and unsqueamish forbears drank contentedly in succession from a single vessel, which was passed from hand to hand, and lip to lip, around the board. Even when tumbler-shaped glasses were seen in many houses,—flip-glasses, they were called,—they were of communal size,—some held a gallon,—and all drank from the same glass. The great punch-bowl, not a very handy vessel to handle when filled with punch, was passed up and down as freely as though it were a loving-cup, and all drank from its brim. At college tables, and even at tavern boards, where table neighbors might be strangers, the flowing bowl and foaming tankard was passed serenely from one to another, and replenished to pass again.

Leather was perhaps the most curious material used. Pitchers, bottles, and drinking-cups were made of it. Great jugs of heavy black leather, waxed and bound, and tipped with silver, were used to hold metheglin, ale, and beer, and were a very substantial, and at times a very handsome vessel. The finest examples I have ever seen are here represented. The stitches and waxed thread at the base and on the handles can plainly be perceived. They are bound with a rich silver band, and have a silver shield bearing a date of gift to Samuel Brenton in 1778; but they are probably a century older than that date. They are the property by inheritance of Miss Rebecca Shaw, aged ninety-six years, of Wickford, Rhode Island.

The use of these great leather jacks, in a clumsier form than here shown, led to the amusing mistake of a French traveller, that the English drank their ale out of their boots. These leather jugs were commonly called black jacks, and the larger ones were bombards. Giskin was still another and rarer name.