Flip Glasses, Loggerhead, and Toddy Stick.
These fine lines of Lowell’s seem to idealize the homely flip and the loggerhead as we love to idealize the customs of our forbears. Many a reader of them, inspired by the picture, has heated an iron poker or flip-dog and brewed and drunk a mug of flip. I did so not long ago, mixing carefully by a rule for flip recommended and recorded and used by General Putnam—Old Put—in the Revolution. I had the Revolutionary receipt and I had the Revolutionary loggerhead, and I had the old-time ingredients, but alas, I had neither the tastes nor the digestion of my Revolutionary sires, and the indescribable scorched and puckering bitterness of taste and pungency of smell of that rank compound which was flip, will serve for some time in my memory as an antidote for any overweening longing for the good old times.
The toddy stick, beloved for the welcome ringing music it made on the sides of glass tumblers, was used to stir up toddy and other sweetened drinks.
It was a stick six or eight inches long, with a knob at one end, or flattened out at the end so it would readily crush the loaf sugar used in the drink. The egg-nog stick was split at one end, and a cross-piece of wood was set firmly in. It was a crude egg-beater. Whirled rapidly around, while the upright stick was held firmly between the palms of the hands, it was a grateful, graceful, and inviting machine in the hands of skilful landlords of old.
Another universal and potent colonial drink was punch. It came to the English colonies in America from the English colonies in India. To the Orientals we owe punch—as many other good things. The word is from the Hindustani panch, five, referring to the five ingredients then used in the drink, namely: tea, arrack, sugar, lemons, water.
In 1675 one Tryer drank punch in India and, like the poor thing that he was, basely libelled it as an enervating liquor. The English took very quickly to the new drink, as they did to everything else in India, and soon the word appeared in English ballads, showing that punch was well known.
Englishmen did not use without change the punch-bowls of India, but invented an exceptionally elegant form known by the name of Monteith. It was called after a man of fashion who was marked and remarkable for wearing a scalloped coat. In the Art of Cookery we find reference to him and the Monteith punch bowl:—
“New things produce new words, and so Monteith
Has by one vessel saved himself from death.”
Monteiths seem to have come into fashion about 1697. The rim was scalloped like its namesake’s coat, or cut in battlements, thus forming indentations, in which a punch ladle and lemon strainer and tall wine-glasses were hung on their sides, the foot out. The rim was usually separate from the bowl, and was lifted off with the glasses and ladle and strainer, for the punch to be brewed in the bowl. When the punch was duly finished, the ornamental rim was replaced. A porcelain imitation of a Monteith is here shown, which was made in China for an American ship-owner, doubtless from a silver model.
