Daily Blague

At least once a week, I root through the Internet looking for access to modest items that I would buy if they were available. Usually, it's just the DVD version of an old movie (Palm Beach Story has come out at last; more about that later), but once in a while it's a forgotten treat, or at least one that I've given up looking for in conventional venues. Such as Hu-Kwa Tea. Just as Twinings produces the only real Earl Grey tea, so Hu-Kwa is where you'll find the best Lapsang Souchong. A smoked oolong tea from Taiwan, Hu-Kwa is not a hit with Kathleen, who complains that it reeks of creosote and who just provided me with the following testimonial:

Sometimes it makes me ill when I smell it. It's true!

So we don't enjoy this delicate tea ("Delicate? What are they, nuts?") when the whole family is at home. I was introduced to Hu-Kwa by aunts of my mother's. They were half-aunts, really, and not much older than my parents, and they made a fuss of me from the day of my arrival. (Shortly after my sister's arrival - she was nine months old at the time, with plenty of personality - Helen and Bea took me off to a cottage that they'd rented in Brewster. "Your nose was a little out of joint," Bea told me a few years ago.) When I was old enough, they took me to shows and concerts; I'm quite sure that I entered Carnegie Hall for the first time on their dime. Among my first independent outings in the city were visits to their flat in the great Deco building on the corner of Second Avenue and Twenty-Second Street, and it was on one of these visits that they offered me a cup of Hu-Kwa. I took to it right away, and that's why there's nothing Proustian about the tea's ability to summon two lovely ladies: no intervening oblivion. In any case, I Googled Hu Kwa yesterday, and voilà: the Mark T Wendell Company, a tea firm in Boston, is still retailing the stuff ("since 1904").