TEA PARTIES IN OLD NEW YORK

By Washington Irving

This extract portrays social life among the early Dutch settlers on the island of Manhattan. It is written in Irving's deliciously humorous style.

In those happy days, a well-regulated family always rose with the dawn, dined at eleven, and went to bed at sundown. Dinner was invariably a private meal, and the fat old burghers showed incontestable symptoms of disapprobation and uneasiness on being surprised by a 5 visit from a neighbor on such occasions. But though our worthy ancestors were thus singularly averse to giving dinners, yet they kept up the social bonds of intimacy by occasional banquetings, called tea parties.

As this is the first introduction of those delectable orgies 10 which have since become so fashionable in this city, I am conscious my fair readers will be very curious to receive information on the subject. Sorry am I that there will be but little in my description calculated to excite their admiration. I can neither delight them with accounts of suffocating 15 crowds, nor brilliant drawing rooms, nor towering feathers, nor sparkling diamonds, nor immeasurable trains.

I can detail no choice anecdotes of scandal, for in those primitive times the simple folk were either too stupid or too good-natured to pull each other's characters to pieces; 20 nor can I furnish any whimsical anecdotes of brag—how one lady cheated or another bounced into a passion; for as yet there was no junto of dulcet old dowagers who met to win each other's money and lose their own tempers at a card table.

These fashionable parties were generally confined to the higher classes, or noblesse; that is to say, such as kept their own cows and drove their own wagons. The company 5 commonly assembled at three o'clock and went away about six, unless it was 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 ice creams, jellies, or sillabubs, or regaled them with 10 musty almonds, moldy raisins, or sour oranges, as is often done in the present age of refinement. Our ancestors were fond of more sturdy, substantial fare. The tea table was crowned with a huge earthen dish, well stored with slices of fat pork, fried brown, cut up into morsels, and swimming 15 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 of this mighty dish in much the same manner as sailors harpoon porpoises at sea or 20 our Indians spear salmon in the lakes. Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple pies or saucers full of preserved peaches and pears; but it was always sure to boast of an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough fried in hog's fat and called doughnuts; a delicious kind25 of cake, at present scarce known in this city except in genuine Dutch families.

The tea was served out of a majestic delft teapot ornamented with paintings of fat little Dutch shepherds and shepherdesses tending pigs, with boats sailing in the air30 and houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch fantasies. The beaux distinguished themselves by their adroitness in replenishing this pot from a huge copper teakettle which would have made the pigmy macaronis of these degenerate days sweat merely to look at it. To sweeten the beverage, a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup, and the company alternately nibbled and sipped with 5 great decorum; until an improvement was introduced by a shrewd and economic old lady, which was to suspend a large lump directly over the tea table by a string from the ceiling, so that it could be swung from mouth to mouth—an ingenious expedient, which is still kept up by some 10 families in Albany, but which prevails without exception in Communipaw, Bergen, Flatbush, and all our uncontaminated Dutch villages.

At these primitive tea parties the utmost propriety and dignity of deportment prevailed. No flirting nor coquetting; 15 no gambling of old ladies nor hoyden chattering and romping of young ones; no self-satisfied struttings of wealthy gentlemen with their brains in their pockets nor amusing conceits and monkey divertisements of smart young gentlemen with no brains at all. 20

The parties broke up without noise and without confusion. They were carried home by their own carriages; that is to say, by the vehicles nature had provided them, excepting such of the wealthy as could afford to keep a wagon.

—Knickerbocker's History of New York.

1. Read some passages in which Irving pokes fun at the Dutch customs; at the customs of his own times.

2. How was a tea party conducted in New Amsterdam?

3. Explain these words: incontestable, disapprobation, averse, delectable, orgies, whimsical, junto, dulcet, dowagers, macaronis, pigmy, hoyden, divertisements. Read your definition into the sentence where the word occurs.