ese porringers were in many
sizes, from tiny little ones two inches in diameter to those eight or
nine inches across. When not in use many housekeepers kept them hanging
on hooks on the edge of a shelf, where they formed a pretty and cheerful
decoration. The poet Swift says:--

"The porringers that in a row
Hung high and made a glittering show."

It should be stated that the word porringer, as used by English
collectors, usually refers to a deep cup with a cover and two handles,
while what we call porringers are known to these collectors as
bleeding-basins or tasters. Here we apply the term taster, or
wine-taster, to a small, shallow silver cup with bosses in the bottom to
reflect the light and show the color and quality of wine. I have often
seen the item wine-taster in colonial inventories and wills, but never
bleeding-basin; while porringers were almost universal on such lists.
Some families had a dozen. I have found fifteen in one old New England
farmhouse. The small porringers are sometimes called posnets, which is
an old-time word that may originally have referred to a posset-cup.

"Spoons," says the learned archaeologist, Laborde, "if not as old as the
world, are as old as soup." All the colonists had spoons, and certainly
all needed them, for at that time much of their food was in the form of
soup and "spoon-meat," such as had to be eaten with spoons when there
were no forks. Meat was usually made into hashes or ragouts; thick stews
and soups with chopped vegetables and meats were common, as were
hotch-pots. The cereal foods, which formed so large a part of English
fare in the New World, were more frequently boiled in porridge than
baked in loaves. Many of the spoons were of pewter. Worn-out pewter
plates and dishes could be recast into new pewter spoons. The moulds
were of wood or iron. The spoon mould of one of the first settlers of
Greenfield, Massachusetts, named Martindale, is here shown with a
pewter spoon. In this mould all his spoons and those of his neighbors
were cast. It is now in the Deerfield Memorial Hall.

A still more universal spoon material was alchymy, also called occamy,
alcamy, arkamy, etc., a metal never used now, which was made of a
mixture of pan-brass and arsenicum. Wooden spoons, too, were always
seen. In Pennsylvania and New York laurel was called spoonwood, because
the Indians made pretty white spoons from that wood to sell to the
colonists. Horn was an appropriate and ava