.... I Used to Like Desserts
Time was we would go out and eat a three-course meal, today it is usually main course only (though in the Time of Covid we have not been
out since we took up that nice Rishi Sunak’s invitation ‘to eat out to help out’).
Part of the problem is the increasing size of pub main courses, but most of it
is our increasing age – we just can’t eat like we use to.
So, this post is a celebration of all things sweet. It is not quite a fond farewell, we are still in 'one dessert, two spoons' territory, and of course there are many occasions where the casual purchase of something small and sweet is deemed appropriate.
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| My dessert at Rick Stein's Seafood Restaurant, Padstow (2007) |
So where to start?
Portugal, Obviously
Why obviously? Because we have spent a week or two in the Algarve every October this century, and would be there right now if our flight had
not been cancelled by the Curse of Covid.
The Algarve to us means, first and foremost, sea-food, fresh from the briny and expertly cooked, but a meal should not stop there.
Dessert menus generally involve a large glossy folded card produced by a manufacturer of synthetic desserts and ice creams. Stuck
somewhere on the card there will be a small, sometimes hand-written,
list of desserts for grown-ups, many of which will have been made in-house.
Ever present is pudim flan, a rich eggy caramel custard, which is
perfect when you have too little room for anything heavier. Sometimes it is
just perfect.
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| Lynne and a pudim flan, Martin's Grill, Carvoeiro |
Many residents of the dessert menu are equally at home with a morning coffee - another of the pleasures of Portugal and the reason
why each trip is traditionally followed by a diet.
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| Coffee and Cakes, Ferragudo (2012) |
An assortment of bolos (cakes) and tartes (translation unnecessary) are made from local produce including (but not limited to) almonds, figs, carobs, oranges and apples. The cakes will always be made with one egg more than would be normal elsewhere and are universally wonderful.
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| Different cakes (and cups) but at the same place in 2011 |
Apple Cakes
Portuguese apple cake is moist, flavourful and lovely. Elsewhere apple can be a little dull, though Lynne’s Dorset apple cake is
always a delight and a French apple tart can be a thing of beauty. So is Moldovan
apple cake – who knew there was such a thing? We made it our lunch in the ambitiously
named Eco-resort, actually a clutch of traditional painted houses, in the
village of Butuceni. Butuceni sees few visitors – it deserves more (click here to find out why).
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| Lynne and a Moldovan apple cake, Butuceni Eco-Resort |
Pasteis de Nata
Our favourite and most frequent accompaniment to morning coffee is the pastel de nata (literally, if misleadingly, ‘cream
pastry’)
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| Cafe con leite and a pastel de nata |
Baked fresh every day – the supermarket version is cheap but a shadow of the real thing - the pastry is crisp and flaky, the filling rich with vanilla and egg. It can be enjoyed anywhere, but I know of nowhere better than the Pastelaria Fabrica Velha in Carvoeiro, one of our favourite Algarve coffee spots.
I will also briefly mention Lord Stow’s Garden Café in the former Portuguese colony of Macau, just across the Pearl River estuary from
Hong Kong. (Click
here for our visit and ‘Lord Stow’s’ unusual back story.)
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| Lord Stow's Garden Café, Coloane, Macau |
Lord Stow’s egg tarts are based on the pastel de nata; the pastry is first class, but they look a little too tidy and the oversweet filling lacks the subtlety
of the real thing. Expanding from the Garden Café, Lord Stow bakery franchises can now be found in several east Asian luxury hotels.
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| Lord Stow's egg tarts, Coloane, Macau |
SE Asia (and Mexico)
Vietnam
Having reached Macau we shall stay in Asia. There are many sweet foods in China, but there are no desserts because there are no courses.
Dishes are ordered, arrive when they are ready and are shared by everybody.
The same is not true in Vietnam which has its own distinctive style. Finishing a meal with soup seems odd to us, but why not? In Hanoi
(click
here) our first dinner ended with che bo bo, a soup (though che means ‘tea’)
described on the menu as a sweet southern dessert consommé.
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| Lynne and Nhu (representative of Haivenu Travel) at the Ly Club, Hanoi - we had not quite reached the dessert soup yet |
At the other end of the country, Ngon is a Saigon institution. The huge restaurant is housed in a colonial mansion where tables fill the entrance
hall, atrium, courtyard and every ground floor room. It was packed with office
workers, students and suburban ladies on shopping expeditions; everybody, it
seemed, headed for Ngon at lunch time.
Fortunately, we had a booking and a waiter led us confidently through the throng to the only spare seats in the building (for the full story click here). Sweetness is all-pervasive, so making good
desserts is easy, but sublime desserts are rare. At Ngon, my glutinous
rice balls swimming in a ginger and coconut milk sauce presented a combination
of flavours and textures that hit that mark. I had difficulty grasping the idea
that, for the locals, such delights are ordinary everyday food.
In the former imperial city of Hue, in Vietnam's narrow waist, we were treated to an 8-course imperial banquet. The food was all
right, no more, but the presentation of each course was memorable. The dessert
of sweetened red bean paste formed into fruits was one of the most inventive,
though of course the fruits all tasted the same, regardless of colour or shape.
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| Fruits made from Bean Paste, Placid Garden Manor Restaurant, Hue |
Malaysia
Malaysia is a great place to eat, but desserts are not a high priority. Cendol is a sort of national dessert available everywhere from
4-star hotels to street food stalls; the price varies, but the quality is much
the same. It consists of shaved ice with coconut milk, green
coloured rice noodles, a few red beans and a lot of unrefined palm sugar – simple,
but pleasing.
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| Lynne eats cendol at a street food stall, Penang |
Durian is popular from southern China southwards. The big, green spiky fruit smells like a chemical toilet left out in the sun, but
if you can ignore that, and it is not easy, they taste wonderful (allegedly) – as
the locals say ‘smells like Hell, tastes like Heaven.’
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| Green durian and red dragon fruit, Banh Thanh Market, Ho Chi Minh City |
Malaysia is peak durian territory. There are shops entirely devoted to durian and the pastries and confections made from it.
One-bite durian puffs are an easy way to approach the challenge, but the ‘one-bite’
is important. Attempting two bites deposits a surprisingly large slick of durian slurry over an extensive area (as well I know). The smell is
repressed by the cooking and the flavour is actually quite pleasant.
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| The one-bite durian puff, Malacca |
Emboldened, we tried a durian ice-cream on a stick in Kuala Lumpur, and actually enjoyed it.
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| Durian ice-cream. Are we beginning to develop a taste? Central Market, Kuala Lumpur |
Ice Cream
So, having reached ice cream, here is a brief rant.
Ice-cream parlours figured large in my youth, or at least Borza’s on the prom in Porthcawl did. I know others remember Borza’s
fondly as the last time I mentioned them complete strangers contacted me asking
for further information. Unfortunately, all I know is that the Borza’s moved
on, those that didn’t can be found in Porthcawl cemetery, just across the path
from my grandparents.
In the late 1950s Borza’s did few flavours, but they did the most exquisite creamy-textured vanilla - a vanilla nut sundae was a once-a-holiday
treat (well it cost 1/9d!*). For Borza’s, vanilla was not a synonym for ‘plain’
it meant ice cream flavoured, quite strongly, with actual vanilla. To get an
ice cream that good today you have to visit a high-end restaurant where they make
it in-house. (Click
here for the Walnut Tree in Abergavenny).
Since then ice cream has diversified into a host of mostly synthetic flavours and lost its texture. Some American makers have gone so far astray that
ice cream has become merely a filler of the interstices in pots of crumbled brownies,
cookie dough or honeycomb.
Ice Cream in Mexico
Rant over, now please join me in a leap across the Pacific from Malaysia to Mexico.
To complete a street food lunch in Puebla, 100 km south of Mexico City, we ventured into an ice cream shop. We had rarely seen
such a vast array of flavours.
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| Ice-cream choices, Puebla |
But it was not the number that amazed us, it was the flavours themselves. With our rudimentary grasp of Spanish we could see the usual
suspects, strawberry, chocolate, rum and raisin, even vanilla tucked in the end.
But what about vino tinto? As an ice cream? And queso (cheese) or queso con
zarzamora (cheese with blackberries) or chicle (bubblegum)? Our local guide
helped with the translations, but even he could not render maracuyá or guanabana
into English, so that was what we chose.
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| Eating ice-cream in Puebla |
We enjoyed both. Maracuyá was familiar though we could not quite place it, guanabana remained a mystery. We googled them later; maracuyá
is passion fruit, so we should have recognised it, and guanabana is soursop.
No? Nor me. It is, apparently, a spikey, vaguely pear-shaped fruit that grows
on an evergreen tree throughout the tropical Americas. Its flavour, according
to Wikipedia is a combination of strawberry and apple with a sour citrus
note. It makes a decent enough ice cream.
Now, back to Asia
India
Mava
Mava or khoya is made throughout the sub-continent by stirring gently boiling milk until its consistency approaches a soft dough. It can be
sold like that…
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| The Bhirandiyara Mava Center, Gujarat |
… and the result is surprisingly sweet.
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| Lynne eating Mava, Bhirandiyara |
Gulab Jamun
But it is also the basis of several sweets and desserts, my favourite being Gulab Jamun. Mava is rolled into balls, which are deep fried in ghee at low temperature until they are golden brown, then soaked in a light syrup, sometimes flavoured with cardamom, rose water or saffron. I have eaten many, but never photographed them, so I have borrowed this one from Wikipedia. In my experience they are rarely as elegantly presented as this.
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| Gulab Jamun with Saffron Photo by Prakrutim, reproduced under CC Share-Alike 4. 0 |
Nimish
Nimish, a speciality of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, is another dairy based dessert. Double cream, icing sugar, rosewater and saffron are stirred
together and topped with pistachios and silver leaf. The silver leaf has no
gastronomic purpose, but the cuisine of Lucknow is the cuisine of Nawabs, so everything
must look opulent.
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| Nimish at Lucknow market |
Served here in an eco-friendly bowl of pressed leaves, it was sweet and lovely and slipped down very easily.
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| Nimish, Lucknow market |
Turkey
Another westward skip brings us to Turkey. South-East Asia and India possess two of the world’s great cuisines and although few would say the same about Turkey, the country has, by my count, made three major culinary contributions; one is the donner kebab, the other two I like
very much.
Turkish Delight
Turkish Delight, lokum in Turkish, really is a delight and Istanbul has whole shops dedicated to it.
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| A whole shop full of Turkish Delight, Istiklal Cadessi, Istanbul |
The concept is simple, a gel of sweetened starch is cut into cubes and dusted with icing sugar. The ‘delight’ comes from the inclusions
(dates, pistachio, hazelnuts, walnuts) and flavourings (rosewater, bergamot, orange,
lemon). Other inclusions and flavourings are possible. It is not covered in
chocolate like Fry’s Turkish Delight, which is a very poor approximation to
the real thing inside.
Baklava
Baklava may have been developed in the imperial kitchens of Istanbul’s Topkapı Palace. Layers of filo pastry filled with chopped nuts
and bound with syrup or honey make a rich dessert entirely suitable
for an emperor – and pretty much anyone else. It has always been a favourite of
mine, but in the only photograph I have of baklava, it is already half-eaten (I
wonder why?).
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| Light lunch with ample sugar - Baklava, Turkish Delight and sweet Turkish coffee, Istanbul |
United Kingdom and Ireland
Leaping athletically across the rest of Europe, we arrive home.
Posh Desserts
Sugar is such a dominant flavour that desserts can be a problem for high-end restaurants where subtle flavours are important. One solution is to create a variety of textures, as in this dessert from the Michelin starred Loam in Galway. Called 'Strawberry, Juniper' it involved strawberry ice cream, shards of juniper meringue, sweet pickled cherry, lovage sponge, coconut butter, white chocolate mousse, white chocolate bonbon, hazelnut crumb and a hint of smoked hay. All the elements, some very small, made their contribution providing a variety of textures and flavours beneath the dominant sweetness.
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| Strawberry, Juniper - Loam, Galway |
Another is to go architectural as in this henge of fruit and meringue from the then Michelin starred Box Tree in Ilkley.
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| Dessert, The Box Tree, Ilkley |
Despite my garish lighting effect (it is as good as I can get it) this mille-feuille of raspberries with lemon curd and elderflower was very pretty.
There are fewer problems lower down the pecking order. While banoffee pie and tiramisu have become ubiquitous, there has also been a renaissance of the traditional British pud.
Bakewell Pudding
Nothing sounds and feels quite as traditional as a Bakewell pudding (and I mean ‘pudding’ not ‘tart’, but that story is complicated
- click here for Bakewell
and Haddon Hall). A two-person pudding in the ‘Old Bakewell Pudding Shop’
eaten at 11am (and not quite finished) kept us going until dinner at 8.
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| A Bakewell pudding for two, served with cream and custard(!) |
The jammy, almondy, marzipany flavour of the not quite egg-custard was toe-curlingly lovely, at first, but it was so sweet that even
this wonderful flavour became cloying surprisingly quickly.
Sticky Toffee Pudding (STP)
And finally a mention for Cartmel Sticky Toffee Pudding. Sadly, the only photo I have is of the factory in Flookburgh, 2½ miles from Cartmel, where STP has been made since demand outgrew the resources of Cartmel village shop. It seems wrong that a factory-made pudding that can be microwaved in minutes should be so good, but it is.
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| Cartmel sticky Toffee Pudding factory, Flookburgh |
And finally, finally
That would be a dull picture to end on, so here is my dessert at the Makphet Restaurant in Vientiane, (the capital of Laos, as I am
sure you know). Makphet exists to take children off the streets and train them
for careers in the hospitality industry, so a worthy charity as well as a fine restaurant.
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| Top dessert, Makphet, Vientiane |
Coconut ice-cream, fresh, sweet pineapple, cane syrup and a dusting of chilli powder. All my favourite flavours on one plate (although
if they could have stuck in some ginger….)
*For the benefit for youngsters under 60, that is Old Money; one shilling and nine (old) pence – the equivalent of 8½p. That was
expensive, in the 1950s when you could go round the world for half a crown and
still have change for a fish supper.
