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Saucered and Blowed By Cheryl Hughes

            Every year, after Thanksgiving and before Christmas, I pull out the tote containing my festive holiday dinner ware.  The set includes coffee cups with saucers.  All year long up until that time, I drink my coffee from a mug.  During the Christmas holidays, however, I drink coffee from a cup with a saucer.  The cup and saucer remind me of my grandmother and my father and the custom they practiced of pouring the scorching hot coffee into a saucer to cool then slurping the warm liquid down.  I don’t boil my coffee on a wood stove, so I don’t have need to pour it into a saucer to cool, but I still use my saucer with my cup as a nod to my grandmother and my father.

            According to phrases.org.uk, this method of drinking hot beverages is known as “saucered and blowed.”  The phrase originated in the north region of England, and became the accepted way to drink hot tea.  The custom was so widespread during colonial times that a story circulated about George Washington using the practice as a metaphor in order to explain to Thomas Jefferson the purpose for needing two houses of congress.  According to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the story goes as follows: When Jefferson came home from France, he called Washington to account at the breakfast table for having agreed to a second, and as Jefferson thought, unnecessary legislative chamber.  “Why,” asked Washington did you just now pour that coffee into your saucer before drinking?”  “To cool it,” answered Jefferson, “my throat is not made of brass.”  “Even so,” rejoined Washington, “we pour our legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.”  (You know, either something was lost in translation or our current senate is really missing the mark.)

            According to awaywithwords.com, the practice was so common in its heyday, that the idiom “saucered and blowed” came to mean “that a project is finished or preparations are complete.”   As recent as 2004,former President Bill Clinton used the phrase in his book, MY LIFE (published by Knopf Publishing.)   Clinton says, “Besides, I couldn’t have won the governor’s election anyway, since it was, in the Arkansas vernacular, ‘saucered and blowed’—over before it started.” 

            I don’t know when cups and saucers went by the wayside in favor of coffee mugs, but I suspect it was around the time that the drip coffee system Mr. Coffee burst onto the market in 1972.  According to thenewyorktimes.com.business, “Mr. Coffee was the brainchild of Vincent Marotta, then a real estate developer, and his partner, Samuel Glazer, it was intended to replace the prevalent, problematic house hold percolator.”  The thing I find interesting about that quote is that you would be hard-pressed to find a Mr. Coffee on the current market, but you can still buy a “prevalent, problematic” percolator.  I know this by way of Craig Hankins, who runs True Value in Morgantown, and our discussion on how he has ordered percolators for some of the old folks who want their coffee steaming hot, not barely hot—the way a drip system delivers coffee.

            It will soon be time to unpack my holiday coffee cups and saucers.  I normally use a Keurig coffee pod system, so I won’t need to pour my coffee into my saucer.  But maybe this year, I will comb through the thrift shops and see if I can find a percolator or dig out Garey’s old campfire coffee pot and boil up some coffee on the stove like Grandma did.  It would be a nod to my past and a reminder of the traditions that were born of necessity.  As for now, this column is “saucered and blowed.”

           

           

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