Trembleuse

[3]: 349 A different design, also often called a trembleuse, or gobelet et soucoupe enfoncé in 18th-century Sèvres catalogues, has a socket or well below the main plane of the saucer, in which the cup sits, achieving a similar effect of stability.

They allowed people with a weak grip or a medical condition involving shaking or trembling hands to drink a beverage, initially tea or hot chocolate;[7] whether this was the original motivation for the design is doubtful.

[10] A well-known pastel, The Chocolate Girl (Das Schokoladenmadchen) by Jean-Étienne Liotard (now Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, c. 1743) shows a young maid carrying a tray with a Meissen trembleuse with a silver gallery, and a plain glass of water.

[19] Such saucers with galleries had been common in Chinese ceramics for centuries, for example in Ru ware from the Song dynasty, where they are most often called "cup stands".

As tea-drinking became popular in the Ottoman Empire the zarf cup-holder, somewhat like a large eggcup, developed, mostly to hold small Chinese export porcelain tea-bowls.

[21]: 130 A Spanish type, generally designed for a smaller handleless cup, and perhaps the original Western form, was introduced by, or at least named after, Pedro de Toledo, 1st Marquis of Mancera in the mid-17th century, when he was Viceroy of Peru.

[22] In South America, the Spanish colonists took over the indigenous way of drinking chocolate: hot, strong and bitter, in very small cups either made from dried gourds, or replicating this shape in pottery.