First drinks ‘toast’
- hellothirstforfirsts
- Sep 28
- 10 min read
Updated: Oct 1
Who hasn’t raised their glass in a toast before enjoying drinks with friends? It’s just what you do, right? And it’s considered positively de rigueur to raise a toast at more formal events like weddings or important gatherings. But where did the ritual of the toast come from? And why is it named after a burnt bit of bread?
Toasting (like most fun stuff) almost certainly had its roots in Ancient Greece. Our man on the scene was Plato, the author, philosopher and authority on Greek civilisation who wrote about all things cultural and societal.
One of his most famous works was called Symposium, written in the fourth century between 385 and 370 BC. It is essentially a book about toasting, albeit a bit more nuanced than that (scholars will be spitting out their Greek wine at that simplification). The writings follow a series of alcohol-fuelled speeches given by a high brow gathering of Athenian men, including Socrates, who are attending a drinking party hosted by the poet Agathon. The speeches are in praise of Eros, the god of love, and involve raising glasses of wine. Lots of wine.
Now, the very word symposium comes from the Greek words sym, meaning together, and pinein, meaning to drink – so literally ‘drinking together’ – making it a very specific and important stand-alone social gathering. It was not a banquet or a party as we might know it today – it occurred after a formal meal and was solely dedicated to drinking and good conversation amongst the elite, where men drank wine, discussed philosophy and politics and enjoyed entertainment like music and dancing.
A ‘krater’ was the centrepiece of any good symposium – a large terracotta bowl that was used to mix wine and water and which guests would dip their cups into throughout the night and raise a toast to the gods. It was like a taller, cooler punch bowl. The symposiarch (essentially a toastmaster or emcee) was appointed to water the wine down to an acceptable ratio within the krater – one that set the right tone for the night e.g. they had to make sure guests would enjoy themselves but not get falling-down drunk. It was an important job.
(The poet Eubulus created a kind of krater ‘scale’ for parties, showing how the gathering descended into chaos the more kraters that were provided. He said the first was for health. The second for love & pleasure and the third for sleep. “After the third one is drained, wise men go home. The fourth krater is not mine anymore – it belongs to bad behaviour; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness.”)
Each krater varied in volume dramatically, depending on the status of the owner and the size of the symposium (the Vix Krater, for instance, found in France in 1953, stood 1.64m tall – 5 foot 3 – and could hold 1,100 litres of liquid!).
At the start of the symposium, it was customary to make a libation – pouring out a portion of wine as an offering to the gods or to the memory of the dead (as described in Homer’s Odyssey). This religious act is the ancient origin of toasting.
It’s no great leap to see how it evolved into drinking to the honour of your alive-and-well companions, colleagues or kings.
Now let’s fast-forward 250 years or so, and travel from Greece to Rome, which had established itself as a global military and cultural powerhouse. Under Augustus Caesar, who was the first to proclaim himself Emperor in 27 BC, the city had become the capital of the vast ancient state now known as the Roman Empire.
The Romans had always admired the Greeks and built upon many of their rituals and customs (often in an extreme way!), of which toasting was one of their favourites. Tales of Roman excess are legion, so it might come as no surprise that it’s reported that the Senate – the highest governing body in the Empire – decreed that citizens must toast the health of Augustus Caesar with wine at every feast. It’s ironic then, that Augustus himself was said to have lived a modest and abstemious life.
Suetonius, a Roman historian and biographer of the time, wrote of him in De vita Caesarum, commonly known as The Twelve Caesars: “He was by nature most sparing also in his use of wine. Cornelius Nepos writes that in camp before Mutina it was his habit to drink not more than three times at dinner. Afterwards, when he indulged most freely he never exceeded a pint; or if he did, he used to throw it up. He liked Raetian wine best, but rarely drank before dinner. Instead he would take a bit of bread soaked in cold water, a slice of cucumber, a sprig of young lettuce, or an apple with a tart flavour, either fresh or dried.”
But whatever the story, toasting certainly did became an important social ritual, symbolizing health, loyalty and friendship. Even if Roman guests were encouraged to swallow a whole glass of wine with each toast rather than just take a sip!
There is a wonderful and well-repeated theory that the Romans also used to put toasted breadcrumbs or bits of charred bread in their wine – to add flavour or mellow it depending on the source – which is where the term ‘toast’ comes from. The etymology may well be true, but I can find no written reference of the Romans adding toast to their wine – but this does start becoming a ‘thing’ and entering the lexicon just after the Middle Ages in the UK, which perhaps is when the word was adopted. It probably stems from the fact that in Latin, tostus is the past participle of the verb torreo and means ‘scorched’ or ‘roasted’ (the derivation of our English word toast).
The assumption was that the ‘toast’ was either spiced or sugared bread, which when added to wine would sweeten it to make it more palatable. More recently though, it’s been scientifically shown that it’s the charcoal that’s the important bit – acting as a purification device, reducing the liquid’s acidity and absorbing impurities. Essentially, the burnt toast has the power to make a cheaper, poorly aged or vinegary wine more mellow, more layered and taste ‘softer’. Amazing!
William Shakespeare mentions this tradition in his comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, written in around 1597 (but only first officially published in 1602), when Falstaff, a buffoonish and inebriated character, asks:
"Go, fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in 't"
To translate: Sack was the name of a fortified wine, like today’s sherry, with the word probably deriving from saca (meaning ‘export’ in Spanish). A quart was the volume, equivalent to about 0.95 litres today. And toast was literally toast.
There’s an earlier written reference to toast being in wine too – from a passage in The Pilgrimage of Princes, written by Lodowick Lloyd, a Welsh courtier and sergeant at arms for Elizabeth I. Written in 1573, it says: “Alphonsus … tooke a toaste out of his cuppe, and cast it to the Dogge.” Clearly it didn’t taste that nice after soaking up all those impurities!
Later, George Wither, a prolific English poet and pamphleteer, mentions in his satirical essays ‘Abuses Stript and Whipt’ (published 1613) of a draught "that must be spiced with a nut-browne tost".
The term ‘toast’ then grew in popularity – and gradually became associated with raising a glass to one another with an alcoholic drink. There’s a wild story set in the spa city of Bath that was told in Tatler, a literary journal that inspired the name of the more contemporary magazine, in 1706. The story was set in the reign of Charles II, so about 1660 or 50 years before, but explains how ‘toast’ came to represent the person being honoured with a drink and not just the drink itself.
"It happened that on a publick day a celebrated beauty of those times was in the Cross Bath, and one of the crowd of her admirers took a glass of the water in which the fair one stood, and drank her health to the company. There was in the place a gay fellow, half fuddled, who offered to jump in, and swore though he liked not the liquor, he would have the toast."
(By ‘toast’ he is of course referring to the lady herself in a rather derogatory way!).
Forty years later, author Henry Fielding – a satirical writer often cited as the founder of the traditional English novel – confirmed the meaning of the term ‘toast’ as a call for people to raise their glasses in celebration of a person or thing. In his weekly political journal, The True Patriot: And the History of Our Own Times, on 28th January 1746, it says:
“When Sir John asked him for a toast, which you know is another word for drinking the health of one’s friend, or wife, or some person of public eminence, he named the health of a married woman, filled out a bumper of wine, swore he would drink her health in vinegar, and at last openly professed he would commit adultery with her if he could.”
This led to the later idiom ‘toast of the town’, which referred to a person who’s very popular or admired. Later still, in the influential social journal Household Words, which was edited by Charles Dickens, we’re told that in the bygone days of Queen Anne, a great drinker would have been known as a ‘knight of the toast’.
But it wasn’t just wine goblets that drinkers were adding toast to. Since medieval times in the UK, less affluent merrymakers were putting charred bread in just about every drink they could get their hands on.
Wassail, which was a warm spiced cider typically enjoyed in late December or January (usually on Twelfth Night) to encourage a bountiful apple harvest the following year, was traditionally served with toast on top. This cider-dipped toast was even tied to apple trees as part of the annual pagan ritual – the bread a symbol of plenty.
In fact, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia regum Britanniae, or The History of the Kings of Britain, written in around 1136, he claims the term ‘wassail’ was the first ever reference to a proper drinking toast in England. His story takes place in 450 AD at a feast hosted by Hengist, a German mercenary, in honour of King Vortigern (who was just a powerful local Brit warlord, really). Hengist’s daughter Rowena was said to have offered wine to the king saying: “Louerd King, wæs hæil!” after which they both drank. The etymology is sound, as it’s known that wassail was a common greeting among Anglo-Saxons, and meant ‘good health’ or ‘be healthy’. The current spelling of wassail was a later Middle English contraction.
Geoffrey goes on to tell us that from that day on, it became a custom in Britain for a drinker to say to his companion “Wæs hæil!” and for the recipient to respond with “Drinc heil!”. They would then drink from a shared goblet – thus proving the drink wasn’t poisoned (‘good health’ indeed!).
By the 18th century, the drinks toast had become phenomenally popular all over the world, the centrepiece of every occasion. Such was its ubiquity in England, that not doing it was considered rude and disrespectful. Formal toasts were even being made at meetings and political rallies, where no food was being served. In Scotland, toasting was being used to make covert political digs – when asked to toast King George II, Scottish Jacobites would honour their exiled monarch Bonnie Prince Charlie – who’d fled across the sea to France in 1746 – by passing their glass over water, secretly drinking to their king ‘across the water’.
But the drinks toast was also becoming somewhat unchecked, unregulated and unpredictable too, increasingly becoming more drunken and reckless by the day. It’s said men were trying to outdo others by adding drops of their own blood to wine when toasting the women they loved. Quite quickly, toasting came to be seen as vulgar, an activity associated with the lower classes looking for an excuse to drink. In fact, it got so out of hand, many venues started banning toasting altogether – and an anti-toasting movement began.
Several European monarchs even tried to ban the practice, which they called ‘health-giving’. Charles II issued a ‘Proclamation Against Prophaneness’ on 30th May 1660, which stated:
“There are likewise a set of men of whom we have heard much, and are sufficiently ashamed, who spend their time in taverns, tippling-houses, and debauches, giving no other evidence of affection for us but in drinking our health, and inveighing against all others who are not of their own dissolute temper”.
Louis XIV, the Sun King, saw the effect that the drinking of ‘healths’ produced upon France, so he personally banned the custom at Court. Incidentally, Louis also banned the use of sharp knives at dinner tables in 1669 when trying to reduce violence, which is why our table knifes are more rounded today!
To back this cultural quirk up, Francis Maximilian Misson, a French travel writer who diarised his observations about the English in 1698, referred to the UK’s custom of toasting, which he said was “almost abolished amongst French people of any distinction. But here, to have drunk at table without making it the occasion of a toast would have been considered not only an act of incivility but also as drinking on the sly”.
In a bid to get toasting back on track and more civilised, a writer called T. Hughes (of 35 Ludgate Street, London) wrote The Toastmaster’s Guide in 1806, complete with proper toasting etiquette that made it more of a highbrow and thoughtful pursuit again.
Happily, toasting today has once more become a noble and positive tradition, a healthy mix of informal and formal depending on the occasion and group of people. A more modern refinement is that we ‘clink’ our glasses more now (a custom said to have started with the Christian thought that the bell-like noise would drive off the devil). Of course, different cultures have their own toasting nuances, which can be tricky to interpret, but none seem to involve an actual piece of burnt bread anymore. Which I for one, think is a shame!
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