JUST DESSERTS

It could be said that dessert is the mark of a truly civilized society. As our ancestors gathered round the fire at the end of a hard day’s hunting, there is one thought we can be certain did not cross their minds: ‘now, are we having cheesecake or pavlova for dessert?’ Desserts are rarely eaten to satisfy hunger, but to provide a sweet finish, a closing fanfare to a meal. They are meant for pleasure, not sustenance.

Antonin Caréme, the artistic French chef who served for princes, kings and emperors, including the future King George IV and Tsar Alexander I, is said to have remarked that there were five fine arts, one of which was architecture, and that the main branch of architecture was confectionery. Many of his creations were based on ideas he copied from architectural drawings.

Man has been eating luxurious sweet food for a long time. In Asia thousands of years ago, cane syrup was being used as a sweetener and in Europe, fruit and honey were used. Sugar is the backbone of desserts and its increasing availability as a more refined sugar and a less expensive product has given rise to the invention of a million recipes.

Sugar, like spices, reached the Western world via the Arab trade routes and, when it first appeared, was available only in tiny quantities and used medicinally. Known as white gold, it was prohibitively expensive. During the next few centuries, the rich used sugar, like spices, indiscriminately as a sign of wealth, sprinkled on everything they ate. It wasn’t until the 15th century that the Italians went back to Arabic traditions of using sugar in a select few dishes.

The rich may have been enjoying sweet food for hundreds of years but, in the Western world, the idea of dessert as a separate course is relatively modern. Sweet dishes were originally served on the banqueting table with the savoury: a typical example of one ‘course’ might be veal, tongue, chicken, blancmange, vol-au-vent, a cake and a fish. Many desserts actually evolved from savoury dishes to sweet. For example, one of the oldest known desserts is blancmange, which started life as a dish of pounded chicken breasts and almonds.

Pies often included both sweet (fruit) and savoury (meat) fillings together. Jelly began as a savoury decorative dish at banquets—gelatine boiled from animal bones and moulded creatively would be the centrepiece of the table, displaying the chef’s great talents and control of his raw ingredients.

This gelatine then began to be sweetened. When the Victorians invented the copper jelly mould the idea took off with a vengeance, leading to a frenzy of moulded blancmanges, creams and cakes (often named simply ‘shapes’). Powdered gelatine was created in the 1840s but did not really become popular until much later with the advent of ice boxes and home refrigeration.

The sweet pudding has only existed for the last couple of centuries—before that the pudding was a savoury mixture of grain and dried fruit stuffed into animal guts and boiled in the same broth as the meat and vegetables. (Fortunately for our squeamish modern palates, today’s only reminder of this is the beef suet in a traditional Christmas plum pudding.) This manner of cooking, using nothing but an open hearth, was available to all, while cakes and other desserts requiring ovens were still only enjoyed by the rich. The invention of the pudding cloth in the 17th century coincided with an increased importation of dried fruit to England and a drop in the price of sugar, making it available to the not-so-rich. Hence the sweet pudding was born.

A well-stocked table, with a multitude of dishes set out, had always been a graphic way of displaying wealth, but in the 16th century the banqueting tables began to be cleared for dessert. The word itself derives from the French ‘desssewie’, the cleared or de-served table. Plates were removed and the table swept clear of crumbs. Sometimes the guests would retire to another room (or another building!) for dessert.

In Victorian England the tradition arose of removing the tablecloth before serving dessert. Although there are obviously many old and traditional desserts, the last couple of centuries has seen a plethora of newer recipes. The development of transportation, the invention of refrigeration, and the exploration of the world which transplanted hundreds of different types of fruit from one place to the next and introduced new ingredients such as chocolate, spices and sugar to the Western world has created a myriad of wonderful recipes.

Ice cream, now taken entirely for granted for desserts, was, as a commercially available product, the direct result of the invention of refrigeration techniques. Cold food was originally thought to be poisonous or dangerous to eat and was a novelty served at special occasions and eaten with some bravado. Food and drinks were usually taken tepid (hot drinks such as tea and coffee were equally frowned upon when they first arrived on the scene). Ice, until the first ice-making machines appeared in the 1860s, was a natural commodity that had to be gathered, transported and stored in insulated ice houses.

The advent of ice boxes changed the face of what could be stored at home. It was also now possible to set jelly and freeze ice cream at home. All over the world different cultures have their own versions of desserts and it is surprising how similar they can be. Rice puddings come in many forms, from hot creamy and oven baked in the West to sticky black varieties in the East.

Puddings and desserts made with bread and noodles are common in many cuisines and ice creams are fairly universal, from the gelati of Italy to the kulfi of India. Migrants from Europe who settled in America and Australia took with them the desserts from their own cultures as well as inventing new ones with ingredients now available. Many countries took on their own national desserts; Pavlova is as Australian as Ned Kelly, and ice cream became a national symbol in America—it was deemed an essential foodstuff and indispensable to the morale of the army. (Ironically, in’1942 ice cream was banned as part of the war effort in Britain where it was named as a “luxury’ item.)

The British themselves are associated with steamed and baked puddings as desserts. As well as the favouritism of nationality, desserts fall in and out of fashion: jell-0 made its all-encompassing appearance in the 40s and 50s, baked alaska and black forest gateaux wowed the 70s, tiramisu was the dessert of the 80s, and the 90s gave us sticky date pudding and the ubiquitous crème brûlée. Who knows what the new millennium holds… What do you think will be the desserts of the first decade of 2000?

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