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Essays: Entertaining At High Tea in the Old Days

Although over 75 years have passed since I last observed the very proper proceedings at age 12 or so, I clearly recall my mother's high teas having been meticulously planned, their preparation exceedingly detailed and their service wonderfully elaborate. High Tea at Buckingham Palace could not have been more stately.

My father was born in England to a wealthy banking family, and his formal teatime conventions quickly and happily were shared by my mother when they were wed in Honolulu in 1917. Eventually, Father became an official in a large and diversified British firm headquartered in Honolulu, and Mother occasionally would be called upon to entertain at our home in Manoa Valley the wives of visiting sugar plantation managers and other company officials. Mother usually invited close friends to share high tea with them.

These ladies were fully conversant with the art of proper tea-taking, which involved thin icebox cookies, little squares of Scottish shortbread and petite egg salad sandwiches on half slices of thin white bread cut diagonally after crusts were removed. Shortly before the time her guests were to arrive, Mother would arrange them tastefully on crocheted doilies on delicately-ornamented Oriental porcelain plates. I could have eaten three at a time, chewing once.

Mother would initiate preparations with the helpful assistance of Shimizu, our capable old-school Japanese maid who would dress for such formal occasions in a colorful ceremonial kimono. The chairs having been taken away from the table and placed along a wall, they would spread on our long dining room table Mother's finest linen table cloth with hand-made lace edging, then carefully place on it four elaborate Tiffany candelabra before inserting the long white tapered candles and straightening their wicks.

Then through the swinging door from the kitchen Shimizu would bring a large tray with teacups and matching saucers. She would delicately place each cup on a saucer (Never, never are the cups to be stacked!) in a row along the right side of the table facing the entry from the living room. She then set inside the row of cups and saucers a thin silver sugar bowl holding ornate silver sugar tongs and an assortment of small crystalline sugar pieces in varying sizes, and a matching cream pitcher filled with pure fresh cream. Small silver teaspoons were set out carefully with an appealing arrangement of dainty linen napkins.

Shortly before the

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