Do you remember when there were tearooms? It was back before baristas and flat whites and soy were invented and the closest thing to oat milk was Flemings rolled oats.
With your tea, you could have club sandwiches, some of which, the fancy ones I mean, were made with slices of white and brown bread. There’d be a layer of mashed egg and another layer of opaque-thin tomato and cucumber. There were ham sandwiches with Coleman’s mustard. There were pies of course and sausage rolls and (my favourite) half a bun with tinned spaghetti and grilled cheese on top. Sigh!
There were scones (cheese, cheese and onion, cheese, onion and bacon, or date scones and all just normal size, not the size of a tiny house). There was lolly cake of course, made from proper malt biscuits and Highlander condensed milk and with eskimoes not explorers and the eskimoes came from Oamaru not Canada and everyone understood these were not the same eskimoes as lolly cake’s eskimoes. And there were slices of Ernest Adams fruit cake with the mixed glace fruit. No really… yum!
There was nothing foreign like cheesecake or croissants or pain au raisin, of course. Overseas trendy stuff hadn’t been invented yet. Everything had gluten in it and nothing was vegan. If you really wanted fancy and posh, you could have Louise Cake or Caramel Slice. ‘But,’ you’d be asked, ‘what’s wrong with ANZAC biscuits or Belgium biscuits?’
The tea was black. Bell, probably. Chamomile, Darjeeling and Lapsang souchong hadn’t been invented or discovered or dug up yet. It was just a cup of tea. In the days of tearooms, no one called their daughter Jasmine never mind asked for Jasmine tea. In the days of tearooms tea was just tea; it didn’t have restorative, magical powers, it didn’t do anything to your soul, nor did it do anything to your immune system or your hormones or your yin or yang. It wasn’t an anti-oxidant, in fact it wasn’t anti anything. It was just a benign cup of tea, sometimes with milk in it; from a cow, not from a soy bean or an almond or a Tibetan llama. The pot was stainless steel, the cup and saucer were tearooms-robust and there was a sugar bowl and in it there was plain, ordinary white sugar, and a small shovel masquerading as a teaspoon.
And here it comes, the bit that really proves your age…, children in tearooms were almost always well-behaved. They didn’t scream and run about uncontrollably and no one needed iPads because when Mums said, ‘just sit there and be quiet or else’, children understood what ‘or else’ meant.
Are there any tearooms left? The best ones were in places like Balclutha and Waimate and Taihape and Waipukurau and Ward. Or at the Conway Bridge. That one had budgies in a cage that the children could be entertained by while waiting for the grown ups to finish their tea.
eN-Zed 