The domed foot rises to a blown fluted baluster stem below the circular plate with a shallow upstand rim. This would have been used for supporting an arrangement of sweetmeat dishes and ‘jellies’, small glasses containing various desserts, which were a feature of 18th. century dining tables. The surface of the plate is perfectly flat, unlike later examples at the end of the century which are much more dished in shape, to contain fruit or flowers. The hollow blown stem might indicate that this was intended to hold dishes and glasses of ice creams and sorbets, highly popular 18th. century desserts in well-to-do houses. The tazza could be handed without the heat of the hand coming into contact with the cold glasses, and thus melting the ices.
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The Bristol Blue Glass Museum holds over 350 items of glass, showing the development of the manufacture of glass from ca. 1500 B.C. to the present day. It contains pieces of Egyptian, Roman, Viking, Anglo Saxon and Medieval glass, but the main interest of the collection lies in the examples of manufacture from all the principal English glass-works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
