Magnificent - Toasts but why are they so called?

Toasts or Toasted bread

Toasts - ‘Toasting’ as a term for drinking someone’s health first came into use in the early 17^th century, but its origins are unclear. The Romans did put toasted bread in their wine to improve its taste, acting like charcoal it reduced the acidity; similarly in the 17^th cent spiced toast was sometimes put into stale water to improve its taste. So maybe the inference in ‘toasting’ is that the person whose health is being drunk has, like the toast, made things better? Toasted bread was sometimes put into loving cups, and after the cup had been passed around the host had to drain the cup and swallow the bread!

The early Masonic Exposures refer to ‘bumper’ toasts, and also use the phrase to ‘drink a brimmer’. In this context dictionaries define a ‘bumper’ as a glass full to the brim; its origins are uncertain, but it is not thought to have anything to do with banging or bumping down a glass. It may be a corruption of ‘bombard’, the name given to large medieval liquor-jugs whose shape resembled the stones fired by a cannon of the same name; some writers have suggested that it derives from a Jacobite toast to ‘Bon Pere’, a discreet reference to the exiled James II.

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