Dessert is Paramount!

Appears in
Paramount Desserts
Paramount Desserts

By Christine Manfield

Published 1998

  • About
Dessert gives pleasure, is food for the soul and is sensuous by its very nature. Never should dessert be seen as a flippant or excessive extra to any meal. It provides a vital structure and balance to a restaurant’s menu, a meal and our diet and is intended to arouse passion and be provocative. At a restaurant or formal dinner, dessert is the final thing you eat. It leaves a lingering taste, a lasting impression.

I do not subscribe to the current paranoia that sugar is nasty: eating is about the art of balance, of feeding the mind and soul as well as the body. It is misinformed to think of dessert as excessive, indulgent or unnecessary. If you can’t find room for dessert, it means you have ordered badly, eaten too much beforehand or not considered carefully enough the most appropriate progression of the meal. Dessert does not deserve this injustice! It needn’t be consumed with every meal, but dessert certainly should play a prominent role when celebrating, cooking a special dinner for friends or eating in a restaurant. ‘Sugar, of course’, reports the Time-Life Desserts book, ‘is present in practically any meal-ending creation. Most human beings have an irrepressible appetite for sweet things, and desserts exist to indulge it.’