the final course created a sophisticated sensory playground brimming with jewel-colored candied fruits, heady scents of imported spices, and playful but delectable trompe l’oeil creations. Similarly, the salver reflected the social pleasures of a grand meal: used foremost with company, its presence heralded the conviviality and entertainment of a shared feast. Despite these associations with pleasure, glass tableware also manifested something darker. Expensive and fragile, it could remind diners of both wealth and how easily good fortune could change, symbolizing the destructive impacts of England’s growing appetites. Much as the earlier poem draws attention to the geographic origins of the sugar and spices, the salver serves as an emblem of the resources, labor, and subjugation required to supply these tables. Glass production required immense energy, contributing to the destruction of forests across early modern England and the growing appetite for coal as an alternative fuel. The foods served on this salver further relied on the products of enslavement and colonization, including sugar, rum, spices, and fruit from Caribbean plantations and colonies in Asia. From this wider vantage, the salver participated in a performance of hospitality and generosity that obscured the realities of exploitation, enslavement, plantation agriculture, and environmental destruction. The evolution of glassmaking and the use of glassware on the table in seventeenth-century England echoed the broader cultural trends of luxury and performance predicated on the spoils of empire. While glass enhanced the visual appeal and sensory experience of elite dining, its role in performance and pleasure at the table also veiled the true costs of these feasts.
Fig. 2. Detail of salver.
Graham Titus, Lois F. McNeil Fellow, Winterthur Program in American Material Culture
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