This section has turned out to be quite different from what I expected. I had in mind a selection of the sweet, sticky cakes, made largely of rice flour and coconut milk and often coloured rather bright green with the juice of pandanus leaves, that you are likely to be offered in so many Asian countries if you pay an afternoon call on a friend. Such cakes make perfectly good desserts, although we do not regard them as such.
One or two of these cakes and puddings are indeed included, but most of them were in the end pushed out by dishes which are more Western in style. In their ingredients and flavouring, some are modern, others look back to the traditional ways of cooking rice in the West, using milk, almonds and spices. Many are variations on a rice-pudding theme, though a few may be only just recognizable. But in the course of two years’ testing of recipes and entertaining of candid friends, it has become-quite clear that these puddings are the ones that go down well in Britain; and a somewhat larger collection of the traditional Eastern sweets can, of course, be found in my other books.