Another word for dessert was ‘afters’ years ago - and I remember having school dinners, the highlight of which was ‘afters’ – hopefully something chocolatey, or creamy, or sticky, and all were sweet. This maybe originated in an attempt to ‘bribe’ us into eating the meat and cabbage, which led to the habit of ending a meal with a sweet treat. Even today, I will gladly give up a starter to make room for ‘afters’ at the end of a meal!
Like many other mammals, humans are born with an innate preference for sweet-tasting foods. This preference can be seen in newborns and preemie babies - the sweet taste helps them relax and suck more, which increases their food intake.
Our mouth contains specialised receptors inside the tiny bumps covering your tongue called papillae, more commonly known as taste buds, and when these recognize a sugar taste, a signal is turned on in the brain that stimulates a feeling of pleasure. This is probably an evolutionary residue from the time when rich and nutritious food was a rare commodity. We prefer sweet, since sweet food in nature is usually of good quality – sweet fruit, for example, which is rich in many nutrients.
They say that that the need for sweet taste declines with age (oh, really?) as children supposedly prefer sweet tastes more than adults do. One of the explanations for this is that children require nutritious food while they are growing, and this need diminishes later on. Biology explains why we prefer sweet food, but it doesn’t explain why people have a craving for a sweet dessert at the end of hearty meal. Is there a plausible scientific explanation, or at least one that will relieve our guilt? The answer is probably that it is just a force of habit.
Some cultures don’t have the habit of ending a meal with something sweet at all – for instance, in France, they usually end a meal with ripe cheeses, or in different regions of India, there is no dessert at all. If it were a biological need, it would most likely be a cross-cultural custom, like the global reaction of babies to sweet taste.
Fill ‘em up!
However, there are some desserts that I just cannot understand why they were so popular once, maybe because they were a cheap way of filling up the family after a meal that lacked taste, or nutrition, or texture – eating everything on your plate, no matter how tasteless or chewy, was a surefire route to a dessert. Semolina Pudding is one – a glutinous mess (as far as I am concerned) made up of grains of finely milled Durum wheat, mixed with sugar, cinnamon, vanilla and milk – and was a popular pudding, but I hated it. Something to do with the texture – not as smooth as custard but not as obviously lumpy as rice pudding.
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Blancmange is another one I disliked that you don’t see these days– a French dessert popular throughout Europe, made with milk or cream and sugar thickened with rice flour, gelatin, corn starch, or Irish moss (a source of carrageenan, from red seaweed), and often flavoured with almonds. It was usually set in a mould and served cold. Although traditionally white (hence the name, in English literally ‘white eating’), it was often pink. Some similar desserts these days are Italian panna cotta (I’m not keen on this either), the Middle Eastern muhallebi, Chinese annin tofu, Hawai'ian haupia and Puerto Rican tembleque.
More please
But a couple I remember as being very moreish were Bread and Butter Pudding, which was popular in England since the 13th century, when every kitchen had a deep bowl called a pudding basin that was used to collect scraps of stale bread, and Bread Pudding, which every mum had a recipe for. It was really so heavy you could have made doorstops out of it. Stale bread, eggs, dried fruit, suet, spices – and perfect hot with hot custard - or cold, cut into big squares. And my all-time favourite, Steam Pudding – a sponge dessert soaked in treacle, my mouth is watering just thinking about it!
Marilyn writes regularly for The Portugal News, and has lived in the Algarve for some years. A dog-lover, she has lived in Ireland, UK, Bermuda and the Isle of Man.
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