Page:Tea, a poem.pdf/11

11 winter time, when the fashionable hours were a little earlier, that the ladies might get home before dark. I do not find that they ever treated their company to iced creams, jellies, or syllabubs, or regaled them with musty almonds, mouldy raisins, or sour oranges, as is often done in the present age of refinement. Our ancestors were fond of more sturdy, substansial fare. The tea table was crowned with a huge earthen dish, well stored with slices of fat pork, fried brown, cut up in morsels, and swimming in gravy. The company being seated around the genial board, and each furnished with a fork, evinced their dexterity in launching at the fattest pieces in this mighty dish, in much the same manner as sailors harpoon porpoises at sea, or our Indians spear salmon in the lakes. Sometimes the table was graced with immence apple pies, or saucers full of preserved peaches and pears; but it was always sure to boast an enormous dish of balls of sweetned dough, fried in hog's fat, and balled doughnuts, or oly koeks: a delicious kind of cake, at present scarce known in this city. excepting in genuine Dutch families.

The tea was served out of a majestic