DUTCH AND ENGLISH ON THE HUDSON
With an appetite bred of out-of-door work and
play, and a breakfast hour at five or six in the
morning, the children were hungry for the homely
and substantial dinner when it eventually appeared
at early noon. Whatever social visits were planned
took place at the supper, which occurred between
three o'clock and six. The tea-table, the chron-
icler tells us,
was crowned with a huge earthen dish, well stored with
slices of fat pork and fried trout, cut up into morsels
and swimming in gravy. The company, being seated
round 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 immense apple
pies, or saucers full of preserved peaches or pears; but it
was always sure to boast an enormous dish of balls of
sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat and called dough-
nuts or olykoeks. . . . The tea was served out of a
majestic Delft tea-pot ornamented with paintings of fat
little Dutch shepherds and shepherdesses tending pigs,
with boats sailing in the air and houses built in the
clouds. . . . To sweeten the beverage a lump of sugar
was laid beside each cup and the company alternately
nibbled and sipped with great decorum.
In the houses of the richer colonists, as prosperity
advanced, shell-shaped silver boxes for sugar, called