What if the Queen came to tea?

Press, 18 February 1986, Page 8

What if the Queen came to tea?

I Food & Fable

I by

David Burton

What would you serve if the Queen were coming to tea? It’s a rather-childish fantasy I know, but I’m willing to bet everyone has indulged in it during some idle moment, even those to whom such pettybourgeois delusions of grandeur are politically unsound.

When my father, a caterer, was contracted by the Nelson City Council to deal with this question,

he served the Queen pate de foie gras and charged accordingly. The size of the bill sent reverberations through the local press and was the subject of enraged discussions at the next council meeting. Kiwis were just not used to paying for fine food in the 19505.

Nowadays, of course, pate de foie gras would be quite out of the question, and not only because of I’affaire Greenpeace. As we now all know, foie gras is made possible only by force-feeding geese, and to advocate such cruelty to innocent creatures in these enlightened times is to risk being shot in the kneecaps by the Animal Liberation Front. %

Rather, the spirit of the age requires Her Majesty to be served something with a national flavour, and for this we need look no ' further than the unique foodstuffs of our land — crayfish, scallops, Bluff oysters, toheroa, paua, kina, titi, kardhgo, pupu. Perhaps we might draw the line at huhu grubs, though there is a precedent for serving them

to heads of state: the Rt. Hon. Peter Fraser, along with such other local notables as Aunt Daisy, were served them as a unqiuely Kiwi delicacy at the New Zealand premier to “Round the World in Eighty Days” (though they found to their dismay that the wood alcohol content of the huhu did not mix at all well with the wine which they washed them down).

I seem to have the utmost difficulty convincing people that grilled huhu grubs, which have a flavour akin to crisp pork crackling, are a delicacy fit for a queen. I have to admit though, that a teatime offering of huhu on English water crackers might tax the inscrutability of the Royal countenance somewhat. Picture the scene: a high collar enclosing the throat almost conceals the faint swallowing motions. There is an encouraging nod. “Yes, very nice. An unfamiliar taste, of course. And now I would like a cucumber sandwich, please.” Well, at least I could fall back on a cup of tea. You can’t go wrong with a cup of tea can you?

Ha! Yes you can. Firstly, it would have to be nothing less than the finest Darjeeling, and the unbroken leaf of the

second spring flush at that. Furthermore, it would need to have been mailed out directly from the tea gardens of Darjeeling, since nowadays all Darjeeling tea is blended with inferior leaf as soon as it reaches the plains of India (and I have that on the authority of a leading Darjeeling tea planter). Next, the full fetishism of the English tea-making ceremony would have to be observed: 1. Put cold, soft water on to boil in a kettle. 2. Just before it boils, warm the teapot.

3. Add one teaspoonful of tea per cup and one for the pot. 4. Make the tea as soon as the water reaches a galloping boil; prolonged boiling takes the oxygen out of the water and produces a flat beverage.

5. Take the pot to the kettle, not the kettle to the pot, because you lose one degree of heat per second, and a temperature of at least 212 deg. is needed to best unfold the tea leaves and extract the desired fullness of flavour.

6. Stir or gently shake the pot after two minutes to further unfold the leaves. Allow the pot to stand for two to five minutes before serving. Whether the tea should

be added to the milk, or the milk to the tea was once the subject of a lengthy controversy in the correspondence columns of The Times, so the only opinion I will venture here is that either way, it doesn’t matter one iota. And of course, there would have to be all the refinements of the English tea party: tablecloth, a teapot with matching cups and saucers, tea strainer, milk jug, sugar (both bite and stir), tiny sandwiches, a big cake, little cakes, and biscuits, heaps of biscuits, since these are arguably the very showpiece of traditional Kiwi cuisine. There would be pikelets, ginger crunch, gems, Kiwi crisps, hokey pokey biscuits, melting moments, Belgian biscuits, nutty joys — perhaps also Anzac biscuits and neenish tarts, although the Aussies, not content to steal the glory for our pavlova, also claim these as their own. Here is a perennial favourite which is indisputably ours: Afghans Admittedly this is an odd name for a national dish, though I can confirm from a thorough scouring of the biscuit shops during my travels through Afghanistan in 1977, that nothing of the sort exists over there. Beat 200 g butter and 60g sugar to a cream, add 1 tsp vanilla essence and mix in 170 g sifted flour, 30g cocoa and 1 tsp baking powder. Lastly mix in 60g crushed cornflake. Place in large teaspoon lots on a greased baking tray and bake for 12-15 minutes at 180 deg. C. When cold, ice with chocolate icing and top with a walnut half.