Naukowe Koło Chemików Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego :: Przegląd tematu - A Short History of the Toast

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Several thousand years ago in ancient Greece the easiest way to get rid of your unwanted political opponent or wife or business partner was to poison them. Just invite them around for dinner and slip something into the drinks. There were no forensic investigation teams and you could always blame it on the gods.
The answer was not to drink anything when you were with your enemies but that would have been incredibly rude.
The solution seemed easy enough. The host took the first drink from a single bottle and if he didn't die, it was safe for everyone else around the table. Hence the phrase "drinking to one's health".
Now we fast forward a few hundred years to Rome where it was still acceptable to get rid of your enemies by poisoning. The Romans had a strange practice of adding a small chunk of burnt bread (toast) to each glass. Some historical guesses say this was to add flavour to the wine or to give each guest a small "treat". The treat theory sounds pretty lame as a piece of soggy bread in the bottom of the glass doesn't sound like much of a treat.
The more likely reason was to remove bad flavours and smells from poor wines. Burnt toast is a crude form of 'activated charcoal' used in modern day filters. It absorbs a lot of bad smells and flavours.
The word toast comes from the Latin "tostus", meaning "roasted" or "parched".
The habit of drinking wines with a chunk of toast at the bottom persisted and spread to England.
By the 16th century drinking a "toast" became the same as saying you're drinking a "glass of wine with a chunk of toast at the bottom". The term "toast" then stretched to the act of drinking itself and then to the entire ceremony and even the person being honoured by the ceremony.
Shakespeare mentions the term "toast" in "Merry Wives of Windsor" first published in 1602 but believed to be written prior to 1597.
"Drinking a toast" became all the rage in the 17th and 18th centuries. When the party ran out of physical attendees to toast, they started toasting absent friends as an excuse to keep drinking.
Toasting competitions and other strange customs raged then died. Young men would stab themselves in the arm and mix their blood with wine when toasting a young lass to prove their devotion and prowess. And the practice of drinking to a lady's beauty from her shoe was born.
Ahhh, the things guys do to impress women. It just hasn't changed.
Predictably, the backlash came and anti-toasting laws were passed.
Clinking the glasses
There's two theories to this.
The first says that noise scared away the evil "spirits" in alcoholic drinks. Hence the clink of the glasses would drive them away.
The second and more likely theory relates back to poisons. While drinking from the same single bottle as the host made sure the wine was safe, the poison could have been in the glass. The first step was for guests to pour some wine into each others glass before drinking. This then became a symbolic touching or glasses to show confidence in the host.
For us,ed hardy boots, Halloween was here. Some of the older folks were concerned about tomorrow night, which was really Halloween night. We had been told, "Tomorrow night you are not leaving this house." The story was the same with all of us. There was a conspiracy among the older folks. They had it in their heads to spoil our tricking, but our plans were already made, and we had taken what our folks had said into account. We would do our tricking on this night, the night before Halloween and forget about the treats of tomorrow night.Our plan was for all of us to get out of the house as quickly as we could after supper. If your folks raised suspicions, then you were to sneak out before supper. After all, what is a meal missed when the fun of Halloween was about to begin?
Just before supper, Wizzer gave our signal then hollered for me from outside the kitchen door just like we had planned. Mom never could say no to Wizzer. I had never told Wizzer about this, but one day I had heard Mom say that she felt sorry for him, what with him being a change of life baby and all. It wasn't my intent to spy on her. This particular conversation was overheard at one of her gabfests with her friend Julia. I was only trying to do what I had been trying to do with no luck at all for as long as I could remember. Namely, it was to see Mrs. Wetzel sleeping and doing something that took some watching and being careful. Just now, they was pitting and peeling peaches and getting them ready for canning.