Ye Olde Cheese is too good a source of revenue for it to be destroyed, and the prospects are that for years to come Americans will flock there to exclaim over the high paneled walls and the sanded floors. The tables still stand between high-backed benches, over which the newspapers are hung, as they were in Johnson's day. The old grill is on the second floor, and over its gleaming coals innumerable kidneys and chops have been brought to culinary perfection. Beefsteak pudding, which is served on Wednesdays, with all the pomp and ceremony of ancient days, is an attraction that fills the tables and sends away dozens of envious men and women, who can get no more than a sniff of the Old English dish, as it is borne in triumph through the rooms. Other days have their specialities, but it is the beefsteak pudding that is the favorite, and if you delay your arrival, the prospects are, you will have to be satisfied with a kidney or a chop, for not a scrap of pie is ever left.
But with toasted cheese to follow, the kidney is not a bad substitute, and it brings with it, also, a flavor of Dickens and Thackeray, whose heroes dined frequently on such fare. With the luncheon comes Devonshire cider, another speciality of the house, if you do not care for beer or ale, but beer or cider is served in reproductions of the pewter mugs that Dr. Johnson drank from, and, for a consideration, you can carry one away, wrapped in an odd bag of woven reeds.
The visitors' book at the Cheese makes interesting reading while you wait for your chop, for it is embellished with pen drawings by the famous artists of the world, and enriched with sentiments from poets, novelists, musicians, politicians, capitalists, and others whose names are known on more than one continent.
"Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, A Coffee House Beloved by Samuel Johnson"
Buszard's on Oxford Street is not as familiar to Americans, but it has an interest of its own, for it has made wedding cakes for royalty for many years, and the models displayed in the show-room form an amusing exhibition to the American who has little idea of what a royal wedding cake should be. There they stand six or seven feet tall and in as many tiers, each ornamented with almond icing, inches thick, and sugar piping, with coats of arms and heraldic devices, and bearing on top a sugar temple surmounted by doves and other hymeneal emblems.
The account of a fashionable wedding in the English society papers usually closes with the line, "Cake by Buszard" or Bolland, for Buszard in London and Bolland in Chester make most of the wedding cakes that are served in England, and they send hundreds of them to the colonies, so that the English bride, even if she be far from home, can have "Cake by Buszard."
And most delectable cake it is, too, and if you wander into the heavily furnished, rather gloomy tea-room at the tea hour, you will find it well filled with city and country people and a sprinkling of foreigners who are partaking of the conventional afternoon refreshment where their grandparents or great grandparents, perhaps, were refreshed. Tea for two shillings allows you to eat all the cake you wish, but unfortunately physical limitations prevent you from trying half of the delicious confections in the tray beside you, the almond pound, Dundee, Maderia simnel, rich currant, muscatel, green ginger, cheese cakes and Scotch short bread, all made from ancient recipes. It is difficult to choose a favorite, although the Scotch short bread never tastes quite the same as it does in one of the popular tea rooms on Princes Street in Edinburgh.
Newhaven, just outside of Edinburgh, used to be more famous for its fish dinners than it is now and, perhaps, you will find no other party in the hotel coffee room where at least four kinds of fried fish, no one of which you can find on this side of the water, are served for a shilling, sixpence. Newhaven is visited for its picturesque fishwives; and the women look more as though they had just been brought from Holland than as descendants of Scandinavians who crossed in the time of James IV. They have been singularly conservative in their habits, and, owing to a strict custom of intermarriages, there are only a few names to be found in this colony of fisher folk, who have to resort to nicknames for identification.
