Coconut cup

She suggests typical medieval coconut imports to Europe passed from India to Aden, then Alexandria and Venice, blaming the German historian Rolf Fritz (in his 1983 book) for the African idea.

The belief had developed that the shells had medicinal, even magical, properties, which seems to have contributed to their lasting popularity, though there was a typical lack of consensus among medical writers as to precisely what conditions it helped.

[12] There were older traditions of luxurious drinking cups with bowls in organic materials mounted in metal, especially the mazer type, often made of burr maple, giving somewhat similar decorative patterns in the wood when polished.

By this stage a shell was cheaper than a bowl made of silver, which has contributed to a higher survival rate for coconut cups than those in precious metal, as they had a lower recycling value, and were less likely to be melted down.

[16] According to Kathleen Kennedy, "together, coconut cups and mazers are almost the only the fifteenth-century plate to remain extant at Oxford and Cambridge colleges today".

[17] A Georgian example in the National Museum of Scotland has a wooden stem and foot, the silver restricted to bands around the rim and bowl.

[18] They continued to be made in the 19th century,[19] and into the 20th, with an extravagant art nouveau example of 1915 by the German metal artist Ernst Riegel that is now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, Germany.

[21][22] Nuts also made the torsos of various other animals, mostly boars, to which heads and feet were added; animal-shaped cups were mostly a Germanic style.