What’s your pleasure? A hot fudge sundae with whipped cream and a bright red cherry or a warm apple pie with a scoop of ice cream? Crème brêulée, strawberry shortcake, red velvet, or cheesecake? The choices are endless, with more “invented” every day.
We’re wired to love sweet. Scientists found that taste buds develop in the eighth week of pregnancy. Unborn babies “smile” when exposed to sweet tastes in the womb; they “frown” at bitter tastes. See www.jerifink.com/born-to-be-sweet
From the cave people who scooped honey out of abandoned hives to flaming Bananas Foster or Israeli Mozart Cake, sweet comes in all flavors, sizes, and shapes.
It’s no surprise that everyone loves sweets.
According to Nikita Ephanov in Tasting Table, we think of dessert as something that ends the meal. The French word was “first found in print in 1539, a conjugation of the word desservir and referencing the act of clearing the table.”
Desserts were around long before the French gave us the word and order. Most people eat dessert at the end of the meal – some believe desserts should be first.
Can you imagine eating a gooey chocolate brownie before your burger and fries?
A study from the University of Arizona, in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied found that subjects who chose “indulgent desserts first” would select lower-calorie main or side dishes, reducing their overall intake.
Time Magazine quoted Dental Surgeon Howard Raper, “sweets eaten at the beginning of the meal leave little sugar in the mouth [cause of dental decay] because later courses scour it away.” He added that starting meals with dessert “will probably kill much of the [adult] appetite.”
Salad or S’mores?
Ancient Romans often drank sweet wine before dinner. It evolved into Renaissance Italians serving sweet liquors and small snacks before the main meal. They called it appertivo from the Latin aperire – to open the stomach. Today, several cultures serve dessert first, like Turkey, Indonesia, and Thailand.
Where did all these customs, rules, and recipes come from?
Consider ashure or Noah’s Pudding (see below).
Legend says that Noah was running out of food on the ark. He mixed whatever was left – grains, beans, chickpeas, raisins, fruits, and nuts to make a mildly sweet meal to feed everyone.
The next day the floods receded.
Many foodies consider Noah’s pudding as the world’s oldest dessert. According to Paul Benjamin Osterlund in BBC, “ashure retains important spiritual significance today across Anatolia, the lands comprising the majority of modern-day Turkey.”
Desserts were popular in many ancient cultures. Egyptian Pharaohs dined on Nile River fruits like dates and figs to make sweet treats. Imperial China served sweets made from fruits and pastries. Vikings baked a cake-like confection they called kaka. Sumerians, often credited with the first to build urban civilizations, used pastries, fruits, and nuts sweetened with date syrup.
Then everything changed.
The story began 10,000 years ago.
Sugar cane grew wild in New Guinea and other parts of Africa, Asia, and Australasia. Chewing sugar cane was popular in early times – although it’s still eaten that way today.
Food historians believe that domestication of sugar cane started about 8,000 years ago, perhaps in New Guinea, Polynesia, and Madagascar. By 500 BCE explorers brought it to India and China. It was expensive – food for the rich.
According to sugar.com, sugar is “one of the world’s oldest documented commodities . . . at one point in time it was so prized that people would actually lock it up in a sugar safe.”
Crusaders, between 1096-1099, returned to Europe from the Holy Land with “prizes of sugar, which they called sweet salt.”
Sugar arrived in the Americas in the fifteenth century, brought to Brazil by Portuguese traders. “The first sugar cane planted in the New World was a gift to Columbus from the governor of the Canary Islands.”
By the 1700s, sugar plantations appeared in the tropics and subtropics around the world. Sadly, the plantations employed mostly slaves and indentured servants. Ulbe Bosma reported in Time, that the “explosion of sugar consumption was entwined with imperialism and the rise of modern industrial societies, where sugar became a cheap supplier of calories for urban workers and industrialization enabled the mass production of refined sugar.”
Today, sugar is a billion-dollar industry. Desserts are no longer the domain of the rich. From a scoop of vanilla ice cream to an ornately decorated birthday cake, we can all indulge. Of course, for those who can afford it, there are some wildly expensive desserts.
Consider Chef Jasper Mirabile Jr.’s “Golden Cannoli.” Sarah Lintakoon, in YahooLife, called it the “world’s premier cannoli . . . made with dark chocolate, candied lemon, and whipped ricotta.” The shell is covered in edible gold leaf. It costs a mere $26,000.
That’s peanuts compared to the Absurdity Sundae that includes a gold spoon and a first-class trip to Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. All for $60,000.
If that doesn’t satisfy your sweet tooth, check out Strawberries Arnaud. You can get it at Arnaud’s Restaurant in New Orleans. It includes champagne, a gold spoon, and 24-carat gold flakes. It comes with a 10-carat diamond ring.
The mouthwatering price is $9.85 million dollars.
Whether it’s pudding, pie, fruit, or ice cream; young or old; everyone loves desserts.
Enjoy!
