Les Desserts

THE SIMPLICITY, the monotony and the meagreness of the diet for many of the poorer peasants until this century are difficult for us to realize. When you do reach the point of accepting the hard realities of their lives, the last idea which comes to mind is ‘desserts’. The word nowadays conjures up an image of a sweet, creamy and rich concoction, totally inappropriate for a peasant community.

What was there by way of a sweetener anyway? For those who kept their own bees honey was a possibility or there was the pulp and juice of sweet grapes, figs or melons but apart from that, until cheap sugar was imported from the colonies and until the development of the sugar beet industry in the north at the end of the last century, sugar was very scarce. In fact before then it was sold only by chemists and so was regarded with some distrust.