ANNABEL LANGBEIN
Sweet somethings
If you’re wondering why you have a sweet tooth, it would seem that your ancestors are responsible. Scientific research supports the idea that humankind’s preference for sweet food exists as an anciently programmed survival mechanism. To our ancestors, sweet food was a safe source of calories, as very few sweet fruits or berries are poisonous. Sour meant not yet ripe, while bitter delivered an alert: poison.
But while our preference for sweet foods looks to be evolutionary, dessert is very much a cultural concept, originally vested in power and status.
Sugar was not always the cheap, plentiful commodity it is today. When it first made its appearance on the tables of the world, it was as a highly prized and expensive spice. Renaissance princes showed off their status by adorning their dining tables with enormous gilded sugar sculptures. If you wanted to impress, you laid on the sugar — the more the better.
A fashion for excessive sweetening of savoury dishes was firmly established, to an extent that our palates today would find hard to digest. At a wedding banquet in Italy in the early 1500s, for example, the dinner menu included game birds doused in sweet custard, bone marrow fritters dusted in sugar syrup, and eels baked in sweet almond marzipan.
In Medieval and Renaissance Europe there was no division between sweet and savoury courses. Sweet dishes, such as cakes and pastries; and candied nuts, fruits and flowers were interspersed with meats and vegetables, serving as palate-cleansers and digestive aids throughout the meal. Dessert, in its own right, did not exist.
By the mid-17th century, the practice of oversweetening savoury foods had disappeared, but sweet foods were still interspersed with meats and fish. Gradually, over the next 150 years, the custom of serving numerous dishes simultaneously was replaced by meals where one dish followed another. And so dessert was born.
The word dessert comes from the French verb desservir — to remove what has been served. Once the table had been cleared of the savoury dishes, the sweet treats were put out to signify the end of the meal.
Whether you call it dessert or pudding depends on where you come from and what you are serving. In the United States it’s always dessert and in the UK it’s generally pudding. Here in the Antipodes either name stands but for me, winter is all about puddings – those tender, comforting sweet finales that warm the heart on a cold night. This week I share a few of my favourites.