The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australian bureau. This week’s edition was written by Pete McKenzie, a reporter from Auckland, New Zealand.
On a recent visit to Wellington, the capital of New Zealand and my childhood home, I had three things on my mind: family, friends and cheese scones. The goal of the trip was to reconnect with the first two. The third really excited me.
I ate the cheese-covered morsels almost every morning during my last few years in the city, until a friend intervened out of concern for my health. And I’m not the only one. Less sweet than the traditional British scone and more flavorful than the American sponge, the cheese scone is so important to the New Zealand diet that it’s almost impossible to find a cafe here that doesn’t have a plate of it on the counter.
Ask New Zealanders about it and you’re often met with rapture. Eugene O’Connor, 29, a consultant in Wellington, said he had a “crazy love affair” with the “delicious bite of buttery goodness.” Its absence was one of the first differences Aimee Cox, 25, noticed when she moved to the UK to study. “I’ll be dreaming of cheese scones until I set foot on home soil,” she said.
But not all cheese scones are the same, as I discovered when I moved to Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. The scones there were too dry for my taste or didn’t have the flavor boost that the Wellington version has from using unhealthy amounts of cheese. So, early one morning after returning home, I knocked on Floriditas’ kitchen door to satisfy my passion for food.
Floriditas, one of the city’s oldest cafes, is famous for its cheddar and rocket scones, which 40-year-old baker Holly Mayclair bakes every day at 6 a.m. After spending much of her career in the United States and Canada, returning home was a shock. “It’s like going back in time when you come back here from overseas. And I mean that in the best way,” she said, laughing of New Zealand’s slower pace and less commercialized culture as she poured flour, cayenne pepper and butter into an industrial mixer. In New Zealand, most cafes are independent operations, not big chains, and appetites tend toward what we already know.
“New Zealanders are creatures of habit. It has a lot to do with our isolation,” Ms Mayclair said. I noted that I often think the Lord of the Rings-inspired stereotype of New Zealanders as hobbits is not far from the truth. Laughing, she agreed, saying she believed that was partly why New Zealanders were so obsessed with cheese scones. “We like the familiar. We’re smaller and quainter than Americans.”
The cheese scone was brought to New Zealand by British settlers and remained popular there, even as its popularity waned in the United Kingdom. “It brings a lot of comfort,” Ms Mayclair said. “You grow up with it in tea rooms and on kitchen tables.”
Ms Mayclair grew up in a remote valley in the north of New Zealand’s South Island. Her family cooked almost everything themselves. “I’m self-taught, I didn’t go to any fancy cooking school,” she said. “And in our house, if there was nothing else in the cupboard, you could always bake some cheese scones when someone showed up at the front door.”
Mrs Mayclair put the mixture on a work surface, formed it into fist-sized white and green lumps, brushed them with milk and then sprinkled a generous helping of cheese on top. Her job is a real stressor. “There are people who come just for the scones,” she said as she put the lumps in the oven.
People don’t usually complain when she doesn’t get something right. “New Zealanders find it really hard to be assertive and direct. We think about it so much that we end up acting weird.” But the intense competition between the city’s cafes means she’s always worried about poaching customers.
Soon the oven was turning the scones a deep gold. Tray in hand, Ms. Mayclair left the kitchen and stepped onto a street lit by the dawn. Then she hurried through a doorway into Floriditas. The scones were steaming as she placed them on the cafe’s counter, to the delight of Georgia Duffy, 29, the cafe’s manager.
I had already eaten, but my stomach was already growling again. I sat down in the warm, light and dark wood of the café, which reminded me in some ways of a cozy hobbit hole, and enjoyed a second breakfast with well-deserved comforts: a flat white and the largest scone on the tray.
Other customers came. They knew that if they didn’t come early, they would miss out on the scones for the day, Ms. Duffy said. “And when we sell out, people are heartbroken.”
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