bride to serve wine and punch to the callers before 

 noon and tea and wine in the afternoon.-'' 



No douljt, make-believe teatlnie and pretend tea 

 drinking were a part of some children's playtime 

 activities. Perhaps many a little girl played at serv- 

 ing tea and dreamed of having a tea party of her own, 

 but few were as fortunate as young Peggy Livingston 

 who, at about the age of five, was allowed to invite 

 "by card ... 20 young misses" to her own "Tea 

 Party & Ball." She "treated them with all good 

 things, & a violin," wrote her grandfather. There 

 were "5 coaches at y'' door at 10 when they departed. 

 I was much amused 2 hours."-'' 



Tea seems to ha\"e been the excuse for manv a 

 social gathering, large or small, formal or informal. 

 And sometimes an invitation to drink tea meant a 

 rather elegant party. ''That is to say," wrote one 

 cosmopolitan observer of the American scene in the 

 1780"s, the Marquis de Chastellux, "to attend a sort 

 of assembly pretty much like the conversazioni [social 

 gathering] of Italy, for tea here, is the substitute for 

 the rinfresco [refreshment]."^" A view of such an 

 event has been depicted in the English print Con- 

 versazioni (fig. 4), published in 1782. It is hoped 

 that the stiffly seated and solemn-faced guests became 

 more talkative when the tea arrived. However, this 

 tea party may have been like the ones Ferdinand 

 Bayard attended in Bath, Virginia, of which he 

 wrote: '"The only thing you hear, while the\" are 

 taking tea, is the whistling sound made by the lips on 

 edges of the cups. This music is varied by the request 

 made to you to have another cup."^' At tea parties, 

 cakes, cold pastries, sweetmeats, preserved fruits, and 

 plates of cracked nuts mi^ht also be served, according 

 to Mrs. Anne Grant's reminiscences of pre-Re\olu- 

 tionary America.'- Peter Kalm noted during his 

 New York sojourn in 1749 that "when you paid a 

 visit to any home"' a bowl of cracked nuts and one 

 of apples were "set before you, which you ate after 



2' Kalm, ofi. ctt. (footnote 7), vol. 2, p. 677; Moreau de .Saint- 

 Mery, op. cit. (footnote 17), p. 286. 



2« Shippen, np. at. (footnote 21 ), p. 248. 



'" Franco's Jean, Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in Xorth 

 America in the Tears 1780-81-82, New York, 1827, p. 114. 



3' Ferdinand Marie Bayard, Travels of a Frenchman in .Maryland 

 and Virginia, with a Description of Philadelphia and Baltimore in 

 1791, translated and edited by Ben C. McCary, Ann .'\rbor, 

 1950, p. 48. 



'2 Mrs. Anne Grant, .Memoirs of an .imer'can Lady, with Sketches 

 of Manners and Scenery in America, as They Existed Previous to 

 the Revolution, New York, 1846, p. 54. 



drinking tea and even at times while partaking of 

 tea."^^ Sometimes wine and punch were served at 

 teatime, and "in summer," observed Barbe-Marbois, 

 "they add fruit and other things to drink. "^* Coffee 

 too might be served. As the Frenchman Claude 

 Blanchard explained:'^ 



They [the Americans] do not take cofTee immediately 

 after dinner, but it is served three or four hours afterwards 

 with tea; this coffee is weak and four or five cups are not 

 equal to one of ours; so that they take many of them. The 

 tea. on the contrary, is very strong. This use of tea and 

 coffee is universal in America. 



Dealing with both food and drink at the same time 

 was something of an art. It was also an incon\-enience 

 for the uninitiated, and on one occasion Ferdinand 

 Bayard, a late-lBth-ccntury obser\'er of American 

 tea ritual, witnessed another guest who, "after having 

 taken a cup [of tea] in one hand and tartlets in the 

 other, opened his mouth and told the servant to fill 

 it for him with smoked venison!"'" 



While foreign visitors recognized that the "greatest 

 mark of courtesy" a host and hostess could offer a 

 guest was a cup of tea, hospitality could be "hot 

 water torture" for foreigners unless they utiderstood 

 the social niceties not only of holding a cup and 

 tartlet, but of declining without offending by turning 

 the cup upside down and placing a spoon upon it. 

 The ceremony of the teaspoon is fully explained by 

 the Prince de Broglie who, during his visit to Phila- 

 delphia in 1782, reported the following teatime inci- 

 dent at the home of Robert Morris: '"^ 



I partook of most excellent tea and I should be even now 

 still drinking it, I believe, if the [French] ,'\mbassador had 

 not charitably notified me at the twelfth cup, that I must 

 put my spoon across it when I wished to finish with this 

 sort of warm water. He said to me: it is almost as ill-bred 

 to refuse a cup of tea when it is offered to \'ou, as it would 

 [be] indiscreet for the mistress of the house to propose a 

 fresh one, when the ceremony of the spoon has notified her 

 that we no longer wish to partake of it. 



Bavard reports that one quick-witted foreigner. 



3' Kalm, op. cit. (footnote 7), vol. 2, p. 611. 



^* Barbe-Marbois, op. cit. (footnote 20), p. 123. 



35 Blanchard, op. cit. (footnote 18), p. 78. 



^'' Ferdinand M. Bayard, Voyage dans I'Interieur des Etals-Unis, 

 ParLs, 1797, quoted in Sherrill, op. cit. (footnote 8), p. 93. 



'^ Claude Victor Marie, Prince de Broglie, "Narrative of the 

 Prince de Broglie," translated by E. W. Balch in .Magazine of 

 .American History, .'\pril 1877, vol. i, p. 233. 



72 



BULLETIN 225: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 



