by Dan Jurafsky
At weddings, champagne is more traditional. But at our friend Marta’s wedding—she’s originally from Croatia—Janet and I happily toasted the bride and groom with rakia instead. Rakia is the generic name for the fruit-based brandies of southeast Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia. While rakia may be made from apricots, cherries, or grapes, the most common type of rakia is plum, called šljivovica or slivovitz, made by fermenting plum fruit into a kind of plum cider and then distilling off the liquor. You toast with rakia by saying, “živjeli!” (To life!); phrases meaning “health” or “life” are employed for toasting in many European languages: French santé, Irish slainte, Polish na zdrowie, Spanish salud, Hungarian egészségedre.
Toasting to the bride and groom, the parents, the grandparents, and so on can add up to a lot of drinking. Even more so for the bride and groom, if they walk around and toast at each table, a Chinese tradition that is now more widely prevalent in San Francisco. At a big wedding with 30 tables of guests, the groom wouldn’t get halfway around the room before becoming what my Uncle Herbie would call shikker, Yiddish for “drunk,” with the result of, well, not much of a wedding night. When Janet and I got married, my brother-in-law John, a man who is serious about his whisky, took me aside and suggested I might want to quietly fill my glass with tea or cider instead of whisky for all the toasts, a piece of family wisdom that got me through the evening.
I assume we weren’t the first couple to adopt this strategy. Which raises the question: Why do we toast people’s health with alcohol? What does a drink have to do with honoring someone or wishing them health? And why is it called a toast?
As we’ll see, the histories of the words toast, cider, and even that Yiddish word shikker are all related, the name rakia has a relevant story too, and furthermore, delicious herb-infused drinks of mixed liquors were invented, not in the last century, but at the very dawn of human civilization.
The original meaning of the word toast was bread that had been grilled by the fire, from the popular Latin tostre (to grill). I’m a fan of toast; my invariant breakfast of a toasted bagel and a cup of coffee is a source of amusement for Janet, whose Cantonese sensibilities lead her to believe that all meals can be improved by a little bacon. And thick slabs of artisanal toast with pumpkin butter or homemade jam are the latest breakfast trend at San Fransisco cafes like the Mill. The association of toast solely with breakfast, however, is purely modern.
Until the seventeenth century, for example, wine and ale were often drunk with a piece of toast in it. This tradition is quite old; the Elizabethans did it too, as we can see from Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor: “FALSTAFF. Go fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in ’t.” While it seems quite strange to us now, the toast was used to add flavor and substance to the drink, and was often spiced with herbs like borage, a sweet-tasting herb that is no longer in common use, and with sugar.
In the seventeenth century, just as this tradition of flavoring wine with toast was actually beginning to die out, the custom developed at English dinners to have the whole table drink to someone’s health. And then someone else’s. (And then again. All that drinking doesn’t seem very healthy to me, but as my British friends point out, I come from a nation founded by Puritans. Indeed, the Puritans of the time thought it was a bad idea too, and railed against the “drinking and pledging of healthes” as “sinfull, and utterly unlawfull unto Christians.”) Frequently these toasts were made to the health of a lady, and the favored lady became known as the toast of the company.
A report from the time suggests that the term was used because she flavored the party just as the spiced toast and herbs flavored the wine. Popular ladies “grew into a toast” or became the “toast of the town,” as we see in this (snide?) comment from a gossip magazine of 1709:
A Beauty, whose Health is drank from Heddington to Hinksey, . . . has no more the Title of Lady, but reigns an undisputed Toast.
A Carol for a Wassail Bowl, by the Victorian illustrator Myles Birket Foster
One of the things the Elizabethans drank with toast was called wassail. Wassail was a hot spiced ale, especially one that was brought in on the Twelfth Night of Christmas and offered to the company from a wassail bowl. In the early 1600s, Christmas carols describe the tradition of women carrying the wassail bowl from door to door while singing songs and soliciting donations.
In another wassail tradition, in the apple-growing West of England, people would “wassail the trees,” placing a piece of toast soaked in cider in the trees and singing around the trees as a good luck ritual. For this reason some wassail recipes have cider or apples in them in addition to the hot ale. Here’s one:
Wassail
4 baking apples, cored
cup brown sugar
½ cup apple juice
1½ cups Madeira
1 bottle ale (12 ounces)
1 bottle hard apple cider (22 ounces)
1 cup apple juice
10 whole cloves
10 whole allspice berries
1 cinnamon stick
2 strips orange peel, 2"
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Put cored apples in a glass baking dish and fill each with brown sugar. Pour apple juice (½ cup) into baking dish and bake apples until tender, about an hour.
Meanwhile put cloves, allspice, cinnamon, and orange peel into cheesecloth bag or mesh strainer.
Put ale, cider, apple juice (1 cup), and Madeira into a heavy pot or slow cooker and add spice bag, ground ginger, and nutmeg. Gently simmer (do not boil) while apples are baking.
Add apples and liquid from baking dish into pot. Ladle into cups and serve.
The word wassail was first used to describe the drink in 1494, in the days of Henry VII. But the drink itself comes from the earlier sweetened ales of medieval Britain. Wine or spiced wine and cider were all conventional back then but ale was perhaps the most prevalent, sometimes in the form of bragget, an ale sweetened with honey or mead. Ale in medieval England was a dark brew made of malted barley and other grains but, unlike modern beer or ale, made without hops. As I mentioned above, hops are a preservative, so without them (their usage was only adopted from the Netherlands in the fifteenth/sixteenth century) ale went bad very quickly and so was drunk fresh, usually within a few days of brewing. Ales were a safe drink because they were made of boiled water, and many ales had a low alcohol content, with the result that everyone drank quite a lot of them in the Middle Ages and ale was thus an important source of calories and nutrients for the general population.
The idea of putting toast in the ale is even older. In the Middle Ages slices of toast soaked in wine, water, or broth, called sops, were often used as a way to add heat, flavor, and calories to hot liquids like broth or wine. The most common meal of the Middle Ages, the thick one-pot stews called pottages, were generally served over slices of hot toast or bread.
In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s Franklin, a hearty old epicure whose house “snowed of meat and drink,” loved to have a sop in his morning wine (“wel loved he by the morwe a sop in wyn”). The earliest written recipes mentioning toasted bread or toast in English all describe slices of bread toasted and then served “all hot” soaked in wine and spices, like these recipes for “sowpes in galyngale” from the 1390 Forme of Cury, the first English cookbook, written by the master cooks of King Richard II, or “soups dorye” from a fifteenth-century cookbook:
Sowpes in galyngale. Take powdour of galyngale, wyne, sugur and salt; and boile it yfere. Take breded ytosted, and lay the sewe onward, and serue it forth [Sops in galangal. Take galangal powder, wine, sugar, and salt, and boil together. Take toasted bread, pour the sauce over it, and serve it forth]
Soupes dorye . . . take Paynemayn an kytte it an toste it an wete it in wyne [Golden sops . . . Take payndemayn (white bread) and cut it and toast it and wet it in wine]
In fact the word sop, perhaps via its sixth-c
entury late Latin relative suppa, gave rise by the tenth century to the Old French word soper (to have supper) and soupe, from which come our words supper and soup. Soup thus first meant the soaked toast, and then generalized to mean the broth eaten with it, and supper meant the light evening meal of sops or soup, as opposed to a heavier midday “dinner.” In the United States, the word was retained in various regional dialects with various slightly different meanings. As a young child in New York, supper was my word for the evening meal, and I remember moving to California at the age of four, being laughed at by other kids for using this old-fashioned word, and informing my parents that we had to call the evening meal dinner.
The word wassail comes from the English of a thousand years ago, when you toasted someone’s health with wine or ale by saying waes hael (be healthy); the word hael is the ancestor of our modern words hale and healthy. English thus had a word just like Croatian ževjeli, French santé, or German prost.
The correct response to waes hael was drink hael (drink healthy). We know this because in 1180, the English monk and social critic Nigellus Wireker wrote that English students studying abroad in Paris at the fancy new “university” were spending too much of their time in “waes hael” and “drink hael” and not enough in their studies. I guess the fundamentals of university life have not changed in the last 900 years.
In some places complex ritualized toasts like the waes hael/drink hael (call-and-response) are deeply embedded in the culture. In the country of Georgia, for example, feasts are characterized by endless series of toasts with wine. There can be 20 or more toasts in an evening. Toasters around the room rise to toast the guest of honor, the Land of Georgia, families, the toastmaster (called the tamada), and so on.
In fact, to take a brief digression on the ancient origins of wine, converging evidence from biology, archaeology, and linguistics suggests that it is in this same Caucasian region of modern Georgia or Armenia that the wild grape was first domesticated and wine was made. The earliest known domesticated grape seeds have been found in this region, dating from 6000 BCE. The region has the greatest diversity in wild grape genes, and DNA evidence suggests that the wine grape vinis vinifera vinifera was first domesticated from the wild grape vinis vinferia sylvestris here. The earliest chemical remains of wine come from jars found slightly farther east in a Neolithic village called Hajji Firuz Tepe in Iran’s Zagros Mountains, dating from 5000 BCE. And some linguists believe that *γwino (the * means this is a hypothesized proto word), the ancient word for wine in Kartvelian, the language family that includes Georgian, is the origin of the word for wine in neighboring language families like Indo-European (English wine and vine, Latin vinum, Albanian vere, Greek oinos, Armenian gini, Hittite wiyana) and Semitic (*wajn, Arabic wayn, Hebrew yayin, Akkadian inu). University of Pennsylvania researcher Patrick McGovern calls this idea the “Noah hypothesis,” after the biblical Noah, who planted a vineyard on Mount Ararat (now in eastern Turkey at the Armenian border): “And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat . . . and Noah . . . planted a vineyard.”
These Semitic and Indo-European cultures that may have borrowed the word for wine also show early evidence for a concept related to toasting, the idea of libation. A libation, an offering of mead (a fermented honey beverage) or wine or oil poured to the gods before drinking, was central to Greek religion, appearing as early as Homer. At later Greek symposia, a libation from the first krater of wine was poured to Zeus before drinking from it, from the second to the heroes, and so on.
These libations date back even earlier, to the ancestors of Greek culture, the Indo-Europeans, who poured libations for the gods to avert bad fate. We know this from linguistic evidence; languages across the Indo-European language family have many words for libation, often linked with words relating to health, security, or guarantees. Thus Greek spendo and Hittite spand indicates a wine libation that is poured while asking the gods to guarantee someone’s security or safe return, while the related Latin spondeo means “to guarantee,” from which we get our word spouse, from the Roman marriage ceremony in which one promises to guarantee the security of one’s spouse. The root *g’heu (pour) is the ancestor of Latin fundere (to pour, from which come English words like fund, refund, found, fuse, suffuse), and of Sanskrit hav-, used for the liquid offerings in Vedic ritual, and of Iranian zav-, meaning to make an offering, and Iranian zaotar, meaning priest.
Drink offerings seem to be just as old in the Middle East. A 2400 to 2600 BCE carving at the British Museum shows a priest from the Sumerian city of Ur pouring a libation. Similar images of libations come from the third millennium BCE from the Akkadians, a Semitic people who took over Mesopotamia after the Sumerians.
The libations in Mesopotamia, both Sumerian and Akkadian, were generally with beer rather than wine. Grapes weren’t easy to grow this far south, and beer, called shikaru in Akkadian, was the common drink. Shikaru was made from barley as beer still is today, but it was also often brewed together with honey or palm wine that could result in a higher alcohol content (more sugar to ferment means more resulting alcohol). The earliest extant written recipe in the world is an 1800 BCE recipe for beer brewed with herbs and honey and wine in an ode to the Sumerian beer goddess Ninkasi:
A HYMN TO NINKASI
Ninkasi, it is you . . . mixing . . . the beerbread with sweet aromatics.
It is you who bake the beerbread in the big oven, and put in order the piles of hulled grain.
It is you who water the earth-covered malt
It is you who soak the malt in a jar;
It is you who spread the cooked mash on large reed mats
It is you who hold with both hands the great sweetwort, brewing it with honey and wine.
You [add?] . . . the sweetwort to the vessel.
You place the fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound, . . . on top of a large collector vat.
It is you who pour out the filtered beer of the collector vat; it is like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates
Libations are also recorded from a later Semitic people, the Hebrews, in the earliest parts of the Hebrew Bible, such as the drink offering Jacob makes in Genesis: “And Jacob set up a Pillar in the place where he had spoken with him, a Pillar of Stone; and he poured out a drink offering on it, and poured oil on it” (Genesis 35:14). This offering was usually of wine (Hebrew yayin) or oil, but could also be a drink called sheker, a word borrowed from the Akkadian word shikaru. Hebrew sheker similarly meant beer, or a modified beer with extra alcohol due to fermented honey or palm wine: “in the holy place shalt thou cause the strong wine [sheker] to be poured unto the LORD for a drink offering” (Numbers 28:7).
We don’t know why the custom of libations with wine or beer developed. Wine may have been associated with health due to the antipathogenic properties of the alcohol or the infused herbs. Wine from 3150 BCE jars produced in the southern Levant (modern Palestine or Israel) seems to have been infused with antioxidant herbs like savory, coriander, wormwood, or thyme. Some of these are the components of the spice mixture known as za’atar, still prevalent throughout the Levant. Wine, beer, oil, and flour (another common early libation) were also industrial foods, highly valued because of the effort necessary to process them, and convenient to spill out a bit as a sacrifice.
Alternatively, toasting may have begun as a way of strengthening ties of friendship between people; early Chinese writings prescribe toasts as part of elaborate social rituals. Other anthropologists have suggested that toasting and libation may have originally had to do with the evil eye, a superstition widespread in Indo-European and Semitic cultures that boasting about your good fortune can cause the gods to harm you. Because the evil eye was a dessicating force (withering fruit trees, or drying up cows’ milk), liquid was a kind of cure or placation for the Greek gods who might resent hubris in mortals. The curative power of liquids also explains the old folk custom of spitting three times to scare off the evil eye (
opera singers still say toi toi toi before going on stage, a verbal representation of this spitting).
Toasting may also be related to health or appetite that Indo-European, Semitic, and many other cultures wish for before eating as well, like French bon appetit, Levantine Arabic sahtein (two healths), Yiddish ess gezunterheit (eat in health), or Greek laki orexi (good appetite).
In any case, the Hebrew word sheker had a continued life as the meaning “fortified beer” generalized to refer to any kind of strong drink. Saint Jerome in his fourth-century Latin Bible translation, the Vulgate, borrowed it into Latin as sicera, which he defined as beer, mead, palm wine, or fruit cider. In the early Middle Ages sheker was borrowed into Yiddish shikker to mean “drunk,” while in France the word sicera, now pronounced sidre, became the name of the fermented apple juice that became popular in France, especially in Normandy and Brittany. After 1066 the Normans brought the drink and the new English word cider to Britain.