Chocolate Cup

After settling in Llangollen, the Ladies started to live their lives together. Although their relatives only allowed them a modest income via stipends, the Ladies still had enough capital to ornament their mansion, hire servants, and order customized tableware.

The chocolate cup set, for instance, was ordered from an undetermined British porcelain factory in approximately 1790. After being introduced from the Americas in the 1600s, chocolate soon became a fashionable drink in European aristocratic society. The specialized ware for chocolate drinking thence emerged.

The ladies’ cup set is a delicate example of a typical late eighteenth-century English chocolate cup set (fig. 8). Each set contained a small cup with two handles, a lid, and a saucer. Its form is somewhat similar to the so-called trembleuses used elsewhere for serving chocolate (fig. 9), preventing the contents of the cup from spilling over in case of trembling. Chocolate trembleuses often had a shallow saucer called mancerina (fig. 10).The mancerina is the saucer with a holder that enables the cups to sit without slipping. It was devised by Marques de Macerna when he was the Viceroy of Peru (1639-1648) and was first made with silver. It became a standard part of the Spanish chocolate service by the mid-17th century and was eventually manufactured in porcelain in Europe. Compared to the mancerina, the English porcelain saucer is deeper and the collar-like holder in the middle is absent.