Sweet Dishes

The format of a Chinese meal, which consists of rice and savoury dishes of a variable number, does not traditionally end with a sweet dish, or dessert. Instead, seasonal fruits are served as the last course, followed by Chinese tea. This custom has a long history, going back two thousand years to the Han times, or even earlier. If you peruse a Chinese restaurant menu, which often runs to several hundred dishes of vegetables, poultry, meat, fish and shellfish, you will see that the dessert section, even if it exists, is conspicuously spartan, featuring a few items such as commercially made ice creams, canned litchi and perhaps the Peking speciality, ‘toffee’ apple or banana, which seems to have the most popular appeal to Western palates. This is not to say, however, that in the vast Chinese repertoire of dishes there is not a plethora of sweet ones. On the contrary, there are many Chinese cakes and other sweet delicacies which the Chinese seem to eat at random moments of the day or in between meals, rather than at a set time.