Another ingenious method of repressing too much drink is to supply it sporadically, and prevent people from asking for it. Among the Newars of Katmandu, the women who make the beer usually pour it. A woman squats in front of a guest, places a bowl for him on the ground, and pours from the jar resting on her hip. (In the language of the Newars, there are different words for the verb “to pour,” depending on whether the liquid is water or alcohol.) The drinker, squatting on his heels, must dip the middle finger of his right hand into the beer, offer a drop to the gods by letting it fall to the ground, then lift the bowl in his right hand and finish it all in one draught. The server offers him a second cup, then a third. He may accept or refuse—but it would be unseemly to drink more than three times. She then moves on and out of his reach, serving the other guests.
In our own culture, women are never encouraged to ask for a drink; men are supposed to see to their needs, and women themselves are made to feel that alcohol ruins their appearance, by making them fat or flushed or both. The number of times one was allowed to request wine or beer has often been limited: in Tudor England, for instance, it was rude to ask for it more than twice. Erasmus recommended that a boy should not taste any drink at all until sometime during the second course of the meal; he should drink only once more, at the dinner’s close, and “he should take it in moderate sips, and not gurgle it down sounding like a horse.” Undiluted wine, he warned, caused “decaying teeth, bloated cheeks, impaired eyesight, mental dulness—in short, premature old age.”
From the fourteenth until well into the nineteenth century with the arrival of dinner à la russe, goblets and glasses seem often to have offended people’s sensibilities if they stood on the table at a banquet. Even when many glasses were available, they were kept in a cooler at a separate side table, and had to be asked for. Servants would mix wine with water in the desired proportions for each guest: it was always considered very coarse, where French manners were followed, to drink wine undiluted. The waiter or cup-bearer would then give the filled vessel to the drinker, and wait until it was finished; then he took it away to be washed and replaced in the cooler. When a woman took a drink, the attendant might actually stand beside her holding a napkin under her chin until she had finished and handed back her glass. In this manner every drink was turned into a performance: unconscious or uncontrolled tippling was rendered impossible.
But banqueters have always been quite capable of deciding that drunkenness, not sobriety, was the order of the day; the Mongols, for instance, thought hospitality had been achieved if the guests got well and expensively drunk. In these cases, people might be forbidden not to drink as much as they could. The cylindrical tumbler which we now use for drinks on ordinary occasions, especially if the liquid is not wine, was once a member of a special class of cups that demanded to have their contents drained. Frankish glass tumblers in the fourth to seventh centuries had rounded bottoms, and were designed to tumble and spill what was in them if set down. Bell-shaped drinking glasses made in Venice in the sixteenth century belonged in this category; they had a footless stem, and could only be set down reversed, like a bell. The Prince Regent was supposed to have begun the custom in England of snapping the stems of wineglasses at especially raucous parties, to ensure that they were emptied. Drinking horns with pointy ends were both huge and meant to be finished or handed on to others, but never put down till empty. Philip of Macedon used a horn for toasting people to whom he wished to pay a compliment, being very aware that this drinking vessel, antiquated as it already was in classical Greece, had the connotations of heroic prowess. The Greeks, in spite of, or because of, their tradition of watering wine, were capable of worshipping the Hero Akratopotes, “Drinker of Wine Unmixed.” They loved imposing—as a forfeit for those who failed at sympotic games and contests—the task of downing a large cup of wine to the dregs without once drawing breath; this feat was accompanied by wild music.
No less than three shots of Schnapps are customary. But a modern dispensation allows that drinkers must drain the first glass, but may “bite” the second in two (that is, take it in two mouthfuls) and the third in three. A man used to have to drink as many whole glasses of Schnapps as he wore buttons on his waistcoat: a lot of buttons was a boast of drinking prowess. Guessing games frequently break out at Chinese and Vietnamese dinners; they consist of calling out the correct number of fingers an opponent holds out at the precise moment he does so, and the loser (the one who calls the wrong number, or the one whose fingers tally with the number called) has to drink a whole fresh cup of wine. Some fingers may never be held out together, because of their obscene suggestions. Only careful training from childhood can keep the taboos unbroken during the heat of combat: foreigners are advised not to try Chinese finger-games. Several pairs of diners might be going at such contests at any one time, with all the noise incident to the game. The guessing goes on until the capitulation of one or both sides.
Being able to “hold one’s liquor” and “drink everyone else under the table” are still signs of a certain type of macho vigour: in a very primitive sense they show such a person to be more capacious and self-controlled, or at any rate more impervious, than other men. It used to be expected at heavy drinking and toasting bouts that one or more men would fall to the floor in a drunken stupor; a servant would automatically step forward and loosen the necktie of anyone prone and insensible. (The philosopher Socrates was famous for remaining unfuddled by liquor and continuing relentlessly to philosophize when almost everyone else at the symposium had either left or passed out.) Men in groups have often found it irresistible to boast of their drinking valour, and to challenge others to see who could “take” the most. It could be impossible to turn down such a challenge without losing face; Alexander the Great is said to have died by returning one pledge too many.
An ancient Greek libation was a sort of concrete prayer, a sharing of wine with the gods. The Homeric ritual for this act entailed rising to one’s feet holding a cup full of wine in the right hand, looking up into the sky, deliberately spilling some of the liquid, praying with both arms and cup raised, then drinking. The Olympian gods were not necessarily thought to have imbibed the wine—but they accepted the gift, the sacrifice of that all-important first mouthful, and a connection with them was thereby established. “Drinking to” people was, and remains, in some respects similar to pouring libations. The toaster rises to his or her feet as a gesture of respect, and everybody else rises too, if the recipient of the honour is important enough; all must certainly raise their glasses. When men wore hats at meals, hats had to be removed. The toast is spoken, and it is very important to look the person being toasted in the eyes. A bow or nod of the head follows, and everyone sips wine. Taking only very little wine at this point is a modern constraint: toasting in the past has often meant draining the whole vessel. Because we all now have our own glasses, we substitute drinking simultaneously for sharing the cup.
The Saxon “wassail” bowl was named after the toasting formula, “Wass hael!”—“Be hale!” or “Be healthy!” (The favourite toast has always been to wish for the good health of the person being toasted.) The Saxon host’s wife or his daughter would enter the hall with a large bowl, sip from it as a taste test proving there was no poison in it, and offer the cup of welcome to the guests, toasting each one. Later, the cup-bearer would ladle out spiced wine or mulled ale into each person’s own cup. But the custom of everyone partaking from the single bowl was remembered and survived, for example, as the British ceremony of passing the “loving cup” from person to person round the whole company. Three people stand up at a time, one to pass the cup, one to drink, and the third to “defend”; the defender once had to draw his sword and hold it at the ready as the huge two-handled cup took all the attention of the drinker and left him vulnerable to attack. As always, love and the possibility of violence walk hand in hand at table. Today, the defender merely turns to face the company, “guarding the back” of the drinker. When he receives the cup, i
ts lip having been wiped on the napkin which is tied to one of the handles, the person next to him stands to act as “defender,” and so on round the company.
Toasting can be done between two persons only. The ancient Greek version of this was called proposis, “the drink before.” The toaster sipped first, then handed the vessel containing the rest of the wine to the person honoured; on especially dramatic occasions the cup itself was a permanent gift to the receiver. At a wedding, for example, a golden libation bowl full of wine might be given in this manner from father-in-law to son-in-law. The bowl became a symbol of the bride, “given away” (as we still say) by her father; the two men, the two families were now one in the shared wine. Many quite different wedding ceremonies still involve a sharing or exchanging of drinks, symbolizing unity.
A gift entails a response. The Greek pourer of a libation expected the gods to reciprocate, in much the same way that the Provençal restaurant patron feels he must pour wine for a neighbour who has made the first move and filled his glass. But a gift, where obligations are powerfully felt, can also be a challenge, and toasting, because it had to be returned, could quickly turn into a provocation. Toasts were not, as we have seen, always discharged with a mere sip: the ritual in seventeenth-century Ireland, for example, insisted that the toaster “sups up his breath, turns the bottom of his cup upward and in ostentation of his dexteritie gives the cup a phillip to make it twange, and thus the first scene is acted.” The person toasted had to perform a second “scene,” equalling the exploit, as often as he was so honoured. A “toasting glass” had a ball instead of a foot at the base of the stem; finger-bowls, or the individual glass wine-coolers that became popular in the early nineteenth century, could be provided for these glasses to be set upside down in; at least this preserved the table-top from some of the drips. Men were not so lucky in seventeenth-century Russia, where both toaster and toastee had to turn their beakers upside down on their heads to prove that they were empty.
Modern European toasting rituals are strongest and most formal in Germanic, Scandinavian, and eastern European countries. No one should taste wine or other alcohol in Scandinavia until the host has made a toast. All lift their glasses and look around at everyone present; they toast, taste, then look around at everyone again. Guests in Denmark may give subsequent toasts; the guest of honour is expected to express thanks to the hosts by tapping his or her glass to attract attention, and then proposing a toast. The drama of toasting has never been very strong in Mediterranean countries since the rise of Christianity, which gave to wine a gentler (though still sacred) mystique than the one it had enjoyed in the classical world. Toasting is given German names in French, Italian, and Spanish: the custom seems to have been reintroduced, in Germanic form, to those countries during the sixteenth century, probably by the Landsknechte, bands of German mercenaries who fought wherever they could find employment. So in Spanish and Italian “to toast” is brindar and brindare, from German ich bring dir’s, a toast meaning “I bring it to you”; French trinquer is from German trinken, “to drink.” In English, the word “toast” comes from the British practice of floating a piece of toasted bread on top of the wine, ale, or mead of the loving cup. Once the bowl had gone round, the host was expected to drain the last drops and consume the toast in honour of the guests.
Today, the custom of toasting includes the clinking of glasses. Drinking wine, people have often remarked, is an action pleasing to four of the senses: taste, smell, touch, and sight. Clinking provides sound as well. Glasses gradually replaced pottery cups, metal goblets, and other kinds of containers on European tables, beginning with the establishment of Venetian glass-blowing expertise in the sixteenth century. They grew in popularity from the seventeenth century as people were increasingly provided with individual drinking vessels. Glasses, from the beginning, were prized for their “ring,” the sound they made when tapped. “Ring” improved where the raw material for making glass contained plenty of lead oxides; British and Irish glass of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries is still famous for its “rich bell-notes of F or G sharp … which throb themselves out with lingering resonance.”
Clinking glasses—rapping them to call everyone present to attention, or tapping them together when toasting—has always given people pleasure. Clinking one glass against another is making contact, an action we perform precisely because we are not sharing one cup; in doing it we remind ourselves that the wine, now separated into glassfuls, is still one, and we reach out to each other even though we do not hand our glasses on. Russians go one further and smash their glasses after particularly fervent toasts, vows, or oaths. The half-Russian poet Apollinaire loved using the image of a smashed glass to express exultant joy. People have often felt that disposing of the wine in a toast was really not sufficient: the cup should go too—either broken or given away—otherwise the words symbolized in drinking are not finalized, and the action is lacking in generosity. Smashing the glass also ensures that no less worthy toast shall ever be made in that glass.
Toasting was used during the eighteenth century to force guests to learn each other’s names—everyone knew that when toasting began they would have to drink healths, calling out their companions’ names. An early form of invitation to make a toast was “Let us hob and nob,” roughly, “give and take” (“hab” and “nab” meant “have” and “not have”). “Hobnobbing” with people was repeatedly being in a position to toast them, and specifically to clink glasses with them. Charles Dickens, in Little Dorrit (1857), tells us how the Victorians toasted with “bumpers”—a term that appears to refer to the clinking of glasses, though some claim that it means glasses so full of wine that their surfaces bulge slightly, surface tension preventing them from actually spilling over. “The bumpers filled, Mr. Blandois, with a roystering gaiety, clinked the top of his glass against the bottom of Mr. Flintwich’s, and the bottom of his glass against the top of Mr. Flintwich’s, and drank to the intimate acquaintance he foresaw.”
Being allowed to propose a toast to somebody present, and therefore to call forth a response in kind from him, expressed a sense of being on an equal footing with that person. When society was fiercely hierarchical, who could toast whom, and so demonstrate equality, was a matter of punctilious etiquette. The Court of civill Courtesie (1591) says that toasting is to be done only to please inferiors “to whom we mean not to use speach of familiaritie,” or to congratulate peers. “A man must never drinke to his better, except he be sure, that by way of friendship and familiaritie hee be content to become his equal”—and even then care must be taken that everyone present is aware of the new intimacy between them, that “it proceedeth … not of presumption.” The seventeenth-century French rule was that one could toast a superior, provided that he was not addressed directly. A third party received one’s words (“Sir, it is to Monsieur that I drink”), so that no boundaries separating ranks were impudently crossed. Hosts could toast guests, but never the reverse. (Hosts had of course to control the number of toasts they drank because if guests kept toasting, the host, being required to respond to every “health,” would quickly find himself incapable of hosting at all.) It is apparently still impolite to take away the host’s prerogative by toasting anyone before he or she has had a chance to do so first. A host, says Letitia Baldrige, “will not welcome a junior executive popping up in the middle of the meat course and prematurely toasting either the hosts or the guest of honor.” A guest with a toast rising in his heart must ask permission of the host to give it, and then only if it looks as though no one else has previously arranged to do so.
Erasmus warns boys against being drawn into toasting, intentionally addressing himself, through his schoolmasterly persona, to adults who might be rough-necked enough to tempt boys to drink too much: “You should courteously acknowledge someone toasting you with his cup, and touching your own cup with your lips sip a little and pretend to drink: this will satisfy a polite man simply playing the buffoon. When someone boorishly
presses you to drink, promise to reply when you have grown up.” Women have rarely been expected to drink to other people; they are more usually commended for refusing to drink toasts, and even loving cups were supposed to pass them by with merely a kiss on the rim of the bowl. Women were not merely unequal to men, but altogether outside the drinking group and the wine it shared. They were often, however, the object of male competitive zeal, and as such the inspirers of toasts. Ancient Romans used to drink to absent women—a cup for every letter of a beauty’s name being a favourite exploit, and one that has frequently been revived since. Drinking to absent women became common especially in Britain, where until very recently women have been expected to leave the men to themselves at the end of dinner.
A woman toasted in this manner became herself “the toast,” after the piece of grilled bread which, as we have noted, once floated in British drinks. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is said to have become the toast of the Kit-cat Club at the age of eight. A tradition reported in The Tatler (No. 24) has it that the transference in meaning took place at Bath in the reign of Charles II: a certain woman, standing in the water of the Cross Bath, was toasted by an admirer who used the water itself to drink her health. Another “gay fellow” offered to jump in, saying that “though he liked not the liquor he would have the toast.” The story pleasantly makes the metaphor concrete—but toasting always does this to a certain extent. The formulae for toasting often turn the drink into the person or idea toasted (“Gentlemen, I give you—the Queen!”). When Humphrey Bogart raises his glass to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca and says, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” the looking and the wine are equated, as the phrase says. When the supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie responded to toasts giving each other “the King,” they would hold their glasses over the water-bottle, secretly (or openly, depending on the company they were in) expressing their allegiance not to the usurper but to “the King who is over the water.”
The Rituals of Dinner Page 32