August 9, 2024

LETTER 366

A Pastry That Tastes Like Home

Two baking sheets of cheese-covered scones in a setting that looks like a commercial kitchen.

Cheese scones for Floriditas cafe, fresh out of the oven. The savory baked good is popular in New Zealand, but hard to find elsewhere. Pete McKenzie for The New York Times

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week's issue is written by Pete McKenzie, a reporter based in Auckland, New Zealand.

During a recent visit to Wellington, the capital of New Zealand and my childhood home, there were three things on my mind: Family, friends and cheese scones. Reconnecting with the first two was the trip's purpose. The third is what got me really excited.

In my final years in the city, until a friend intervened out of concerns for my health, I ate the cheese-covered savories most mornings. I'm not the only one. Less sweet than the traditional British scone and more flavorful than the American biscuit, the cheese scone is so essential to the New Zealand diet that it is almost impossible to find a cafe here without a plate of them on the counter.

Asking New Zealanders about them often leads to rapture. Eugene O'Connor, 29, a consultant in Wellington, said he has a "crazy love affair" with the "delicious bite of buttery goodness." Their absence was among the first differences Aimee Cox, 25, noticed when she moved to the United Kingdom to study at a university. "I'll be dreaming of cheese scones until I set foot on home soil," she said.

But not all cheese scones are made equal, as I found out upon moving to Auckland, New Zealand's largest city. The scones there were too dry for my taste, or lacked the burst of flavor that comes from the Wellington version's use of unhealthy quantities of cheese. So, after returning home, I knocked on the kitchen door at Floriditas early one morning to satisfy my passion for the food.

One of the city's oldest cafes, Floriditas is famous for its cheddar and arugula scones, which its baker Holly Sinclair, 40, starts making every day at 6 a.m. After spending much of her career in the United States and Canada, returning home was a shock. "It is a bit of a time warp when you come back here from overseas. I mean that in the best possible way," she laughingly said of New Zealand's slower pace and less commercialized culture, as she poured flour, cayenne and butter into an industrial mixing machine. In New Zealand, most cafes are independent operations, not big chains, and appetites tend toward that which we already know.

"New Zealanders are creatures of habit. It's got a lot to do with our isolation," Ms. Sinclair said. I noted that I often think that the stereotype, inspired by "The Lord of the Rings," of New Zealanders as hobbits isn't far from the truth. Laughing, she agreed, saying she believed that's partly why New Zealanders are so obsessed with cheese scones. "We like the familiar. We're smaller and more quaint than the Americans."

First brought to New Zealand by British settlers, the cheese scone remained a favorite even as its popularity waned in the United Kingdom. "They bring a lot of comfort," Ms. Sinclair said. "It's something you grow up with in tearooms and on kitchen tables."

Ms. Sinclair grew up in a remote valley at the top of New Zealand's South Island. Her family cooked almost everything they ate from scratch. "I'm self-taught, I didn't go to some fancy culinary school," she said. "And in my house, when there was nothing else in the cupboard, you could always bang out some cheese scones if someone showed up at the front door."

Ms. Sinclair placed the mix on a counter, shaped it into fist-size white and green clumps, painted each with milk, then sprinkled a liberal dosing of cheese on top. Hers is a high-pressure job. "There are people who come in just for the scones," she said as she placed the clumps in an oven.

Usually, people don't complain if she doesn't get it right. "New Zealanders really struggle with being assertive and direct. We overthink it so much that we end up being weird about it." But the intense competition between the city's cafes means she's always worried about customers being lured away.

Soon, the oven turned the scones a deep shade of gold. Tray in hand, Ms. Sinclair stepped out of the kitchen and into a street illuminated by dawn's first light, then bustled through a door into Floriditas. The scones steamed as she set 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 rumbling again. I sat amid the cafe's warm light and dark wood, which reminded me in some ways of a cozy hobbit hole, for a second breakfast of well-earned comforts: A flat white and the biggest scone from the tray.

Other customers began to arrive. They knew that if they didn't come early, Ms. Duffy said, they risked missing that day's scones. "And when we sell out, people are heartbroken."

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