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Uncertain; perhaps from Frenchépargne(“savings, treasury”), though it is unclear how the new meaning would have been acquired. Perhaps owing to the typical appearance of an épergne as resembling a balance upon which market goods or coins could be weighed.
1810, , chapter XXVIII, in Splendid Follies. A Novel,. Founded on Facts., volume III, London: J F Hughes,, →OCLC, page 129:
[…] his precious helpmate sat grinning at the mischief she had occasioned, like an idiot, asking Colonel Lamborn to help her to some of them there thingumbobs out of the silver what-d’ye-call’um. These thingumbobs happened to be no other than a service of West India sweetmeats in a superb fillagree epergne, […]
But I did like a lot of her things—the vase in the middle of the dining-room table for instance. Helen called it Mama's “epergne”. It was a two-storey thing of glass and silver and was always full of choice flowers, pure white geraniums that one longed to stroke and kiss to see if they were real, fat begonias and big heavy-headed fuchsias.
But Richmond[…]appeared to lose himself in his own reflections. Some pickled crab, which he had not touched, had been removed with a damson pie; and his sister saw, peeping around the massive silver epergne that almost obscured him from her view, that he had eaten no more than a spoonful of that either.
