The antiquity of the Posset-pot—Its national use—The Porringer—The two forms contemporary with each other—Stuart examples—The seventeenth and eighteenth century potters—The merging of the two types into the bowl.
A cold climate demands hot cordials. There was no elaborate system of hot-water pipes in the draughty, cold, and damp Elizabethan mansions with their rush-covered floors. It was a necessity, apart from long and deep potations of strong drinks, to take a nightcap or caudle-cup of something hot. In the eighteenth century the drinking of hot punch superseded this. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the custom of the posset of hot sack with spices and having milk and eggs, as a supper beverage was universal. Not that the posset-cup was idle in the daytime. It succeeded, even if it did not replace, the standing or loving-cup at weddings and other ceremonies. “Mix a posset for the merry Sir John Falstaff,” might, and possibly did, refer to any hour of the day, for that jovial soul did not stand on ceremony as to when he drank, so long as it was copious and oft-repeated.
That the posset-cup was of something thicker than mere spiced ale or hot wine is shown by Shakespeare’s “Thou shalt eat a posset to night at my house” (Merry Wives of Windsor). And Lady Macbeth, as a last act before the final commission of the treacherous crime, says:—
I have drugged their possets,
That death and nature do contend about them,
Whether they live or die.
We have seen that the caudle was curdled milk, with wine and hot spices, and that it was smoking hot. Shakespeare says, “We’ll have a posset for’t soon at night, i’ faith, at the latter end of a sea-coal fire.” It was undoubtedly hot, and it seems to have been, sometimes for medical reasons, made doubly so. Hence Dryden writes:
A sparing diet did her health assure;
Or sick, a pepper posset was her cure.