Looking for something else, I happened upon these pictures:
By Boris Kustodiev. Found here.
By Konstantin Makovsky. Found here.
From Ingalls-Wilder’s Farmer Boy we know tea was poured from the cup in the saucer, and then drank from the saucer. This was generally done by older people, while younger people thought it was bad form or old-fashioned to drink from the saucer. Research online seems to show most drinking-from-saucers took place in Scandinavia en Russia, and that the habit was probably taken to America by European immigrants.
I wonder though, how this habit came about? It seems the tea cools faster when drank from a saucer, which is understandable for busy farmers but it seems strange that mostly people from really cold countries (Northern Europe and Russia) would like their tea to cool fast. I cannot really find an origin or reason for the drinking from saucers, except that it was just a habit. Any thoughts?
My guess is that people in cold climates find hot beverages more difficult to handle because of the difference of temperature between them and the beverage. Perhaps a correlating question: why it is that the people in hot climates like hot peppers?
The reason that warmer climates have spicy food is that the spices either preserved the meat or covered up the fact that it was starting to go bad.
Simpler explanation: peppers only grow in warm places. Also, chillis are not good preservatives unless you used so much that you couldn’t eat the meat you were preserving with it. But spicy foods do help you to sweat and cool down. Just like the bitter plants that grow in cold places are said to raise your inner temperature in traditional medicine.
Traditionally in hot climates people also ate hot peppers to avoid, or get rid of, intestinal parasites. Due to the heat meat would spoil easily.
I remember my grandfather rushing to drink his tea before he started his shift at the pit. He’d pour the tea in the saucer to cool it quicker if he was running late for work.
What a great detail to include when writing stories! I would agree with Jane: to somebody acclimated to extremely cold temps, what we call hot may feel more like scalding hot.
It was popular to drink your coffee like that in Sweden many years ago, it was more or less an tradition.
I have read that biscuits and scones would get stale and hard overnight, so by putting them in your saucer and letting a little tea soak in they moistened and softened. The tea would be sipped out of the saucer after the “sweets” were eaten. I seem to remember this being included in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. It would be worth further research.
My aunt called thus “soakie”
Lovely pictures
Great pictures. I had no idea it was a habit to drink tea from saucers like this! Perhaps because they were used to the cold, what would normally be hot to us would be scalding to them. Alternatively, with the limited amount of daylight, they’d need to rush out quickly to get work done?
this is why: you can serve to a table a hotter teapot, meaning it will last hot longer, while at the same time being able to drink warm tea from the saucer.
Drinking from the saucer seems to have originated in nineteenth-century Russia because of the somewhat odd technology used to make tea and the high temperatures at which it was served. Water would be heated to near-boiling in a samovar. It was steeped in a teapot (which rested atop the samovar) to make extremely strong tea, much stronger than anyone would drink. Each drinker would dilute to taste in their own teacups using more hot water from the samovar. They would also add milk, sugar, etc. to their cups. Originally, drinkers sipped from their cups, which they rested in their saucers to catch dribbles and keep the table clean.
Because the tea was very hot, some drinkers went on to pour some of the hot tea from the cup into the saucer and drink from it. Russian saucers were bowl-like so this was easier than it would be using a plate-like saucer. Not everyone did this, though.
This practice is fairly well-attested although it also appears that saucer-drinking was a class-marker–and not a good one. Russian aristocrats, the true tea-drinking class, were strong enough to drink their tea hot or patient enough to wait for it to cool. They expected to get overheated during the process and wiped their faces with towels. Merchants and other climbers were weak and/or hurried so resorted to the saucer. Poor people were said to slurp tea noisily from saucers. If you look at Russian paintings of tea-drinking, this is apparent. The saucer-drinkers are merchants or idealized poor people. Sometimes poor people are seen drinking tea with no cups in sight, just saucers. As far as I can tell, saucer-drinking has never been required in Russia and has arguably always been disfavored.
(Note that the Russian is distinct from cultures in which tea is normally drunk from a bowl or dish and there is no cup.)
What I don’t understand is why Almanzo Wilder’s father James Wilder would have drunk from a saucer in the 1860s. The Wilders were of English origin and there’s no obvious source of Russian influence on them. Drinking from a saucer has never been an English tea custom. It’s possible that non-Russians tried to imitate the Russian custom as a sort of fad, but is this attested by contemporary sources. Recall that, in Farmer Boy, most of the Wilder children mock their father for his bumpkinish habit of saucer-drinking. This is a pretty common to American literary and popular mentions of saucer-drinking: it is something that only older, unfashionable people do. There aren’t mentions of saucer-drinking as a current practice. (And even in Russia it was a source of anxiety.) This makes me wonder if Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane made up this detail in the 1930s as a true-seeming, but untrue, detail of life in the old days.
Here’s a British answer. I recall my grandfather – a Yorkshire miner – drinking tea from a saucer to cool it down. It seemed to be a working class thing and must have been something he grew up with. (He was born in 1893.) My grandmother frowned on it as being a ‘common’ thing to do. When cups and saucers were commonly replaced by mugs (except for ‘posh’ occasions) the practice died out even amongst the older generation. Traditional cups and saucers had a deeper bowl whereas modern stoneware pottery has a flatter saucer that acts as a drip catcher only. I may be mis-remembering, but when China tea was first introduced into Britain wasn’t it the practice for the upper classes to drink from bowls like the Chinese?
Reblogged this on The Dictionary of Victorian Insults & Niceties and commented:
Victorians were like kittens: drinking from saucers!
May father was a fifth generation Australian born in 1916. I remember in the 1960s (I was born in 1958) he would drink from a saucer. My mother thought it common.
I live in South Australia where the temperatures ranges from 8 – 45 Celsius and I remember my father drinking tea from a saucer in the 1960s. Although an Australian his ancestry was working class English, Northamptonshire with his family arriving in Australia in 1852. He didn’t always drink it this way, only when the tea was very hot and he needed to get back to work. Thus an English tradition.
I remember my Nanna drinking tea from the saucer. She would pour the tea from the cup to the saucer; saucers were much deeper and held liquid more like a shallow bowl than current saucers. She said the tea didn’t burn your mouth and cooled quicker. I suspect the fad came from the time when water was boiled on a stovetop or over an open fire and perhaps held a higher temperature longer than the electric kettle.
fun talk..enjoyed the the blog
I remember stories of my great-grandfather in rural western Pennsylvania in the early 1900s. He was pretty old then, but apparently my great- grandmother, a proper lady, would scold him as he would always drink his coffee from his saucer and also dip his toast in it. He had a large moustache, and crumbs and drips would sometime get caught in it. I believe it was mostly a haste thing, as he was a “teamster” in the original meaning of the word, and he was generally in a hurry to get his big Belgian horses hitched and be ready to haul his loads.
If you’re going to write a blog in English, you might want to employ someone to copy-edit your writing. The grammar in this article is atrocious. It reads as if it were written by someone who lacks education.
You are clearly an insult to human nature. Was it your intention to humiliate the authors of these blogs which obviously gave them joy in sharing? You are an impertinent Fuck…how’s that for appropriate grammar?
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the grammar. It’s standard informal conversational English. If you have some form of Aspergers then you are cheerfully forgiven. If not, hush yo mouth. The grown ups are talking.
Very interesting blog post and pictures, the comments are highly interesting too.
I disagree strongly with Breed7, good work in my opinion.
Very interesting. I am French and I was wondering about this curious use of the saucer mentioned in an English novel. Thank you very much for the explanations.
I wonder if this custom started because poor people had so many dental issues that did not get addressed properly and hot tea could be painful because of sensitivity?
I think that it was due to haste. At the table tea was served last and the purpose of drinking the tea out of the saucer was to cool it down.
I have read somewhere, many years ago, that while discussing the American Constitution someone (Franklin?) was asked wich side he would adhere in a dispute. He didn’t replay but taken his cup of coffee he poured some into the saucer. Everyone knew what he meant.
Sorry for my English, I am not an English speaker.
Early cups had no handles, so, it was tipped into the saucer to cool down, the alternative was burned fingers and worse, the possibllity of dropping the expensive cup.
My grandmother and her family ALWAYS and still does drink their tea from saucers. Not the cup.
My mom thinks it is because the tea was too hot.
My grandmother changed upon immigrating to the United States from Newfoundland in 1924. She started drinking from the cup.
I was reading the novel “Farmer Boy” by Laura Ingalls Wilder when I read about Almanzo’s father drinking his tea from a saucer. One of their children, Eliza Jane, stated that “nice people drink from the cup” after she’d returned home from a learning academy. Almanzo’s mother then gave her own explanation of why Mr. Wilder drank from the saucer, and where saucers came from. She asked Eliza Jane, “How else would he cool it?” She then told Eliza that saucers came from China, and that Dutch sailors had brought saucers back from China when they “sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and found China” which was “two hundred years ago”. She says that before people had saucers they drank from cups. The novel “Farmer Boy” takes place (I think) in the late 1860’s & early 1870’s, and the Wilders were a family with a large farm in NY that was quite wealthy. I know that the “Little House” novel series is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, so I’m not sure if her history of saucers is accurate. I asked my father (he’s 70) about “saucer-drinking” and he said his grandmother used to drink coffee and tea from her saucer! My great-grandmother was not from a wealthy family, came from a mostly English heritage, and lived in southern Illinois. I’d never heard of people drinking from saucers before, but I think it’s cool!
I live in Appalachian area of Virginia, Roanoke / Bedford County. I grew up in mid 20th century watching my farmer grandfather saucer. I presume that the coffee was hot from the wood cook stove. Yep, cool it off fast. But, none of the rest of the family does it that I know of. He died in the 1960s. Born in the 1900 era. We are Scotch Irish mostly.
I started looking into the reason why people drink from saucers after seeing it done in the 1984 documentary “Hutterites: To Care or Not to Care” (It’s available on YouTube and is brilliant). The Hutterite colony depicted in the file came from Russia some time ago (can’t remember when). This depicts a closed society in Canada with deep roots to Russia. The film shows cups being overfilled, perhaps in haste, and pouring tea from the saucer back into the cup (perhaps to rewarm it).
Also, Drinking tea out of the saucer lets in more air to mix with the liquid, thus enhancing the taste. That is also why people ‘slurp’ their tea, to mix air with the liquid, and not to annoy the hell out of you! Yes, I ‘slurp’ my tea!
In Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky he states that it was a habit of peasants and lower class Russians to drink from saucer “through a lump of sugar” probably with the intent to sweeten the tea.
I sometimes pour my hot tea into my saucer. My family makes fun of me.
I think “Clive Millwater” is onto one reason for saucers. The flavor of tea is enhanced by cooling. The same is not true for coffee. With coffee the hotter the better, in terms of flavor. I’ve heard some state this explains the difference in shape between coffee cups and teacups, and why coffee cups often lack saucers.
Not that I usually have the time to linger and savor the flavor. With me its all about the caffeine. Likely I should speed less, and slow down and smell the roses (or tea) more.
Both of my maternal grandparents were from the Netherlands. They lived with us when we were growing up and we all drank tea out of saucers. I am now 66 years old and my grandparents would be about 125 years old if they were alive.
Drinking from a saucer served 2 purposes in the old days. To cool the drink and keep grounds in the cup. This was done for both coffee and tea. In days of old the poor did not have filters or such to keep the grounds out.
My Scottish Grandparents always drank their tea out of the saucer.