SWEET SURRENDER A celebration of avant-garde desserts that are leading the evolution of traditional after-dinner treats into a more artistic – and experimental – era. By Bill Knott T here may be little else in common in the lives of a tall-toqued maître pâtissier working his marblecooled magic in the kitchen of a grand Paris restaurant and a street hawker traipsing the steamy streets of Kuala Lumpur, shaving ice from an ancient hand-cranked machine into a bowl and dousing it with luridly coloured syrups – but they are both essentially doing the same thing: fulfilling mankind’s age-old craving for something sweet. It is a predilection that, like other primates, we acquire from birth, stemming from our atavistic need to search out the ripest, sweetest fruit in the treetops. Our survival as a species once depended on it. While the evolutionary imperative to detect sweetness has disappeared, the wiring remains, and sweet foods still have a powerful ability to provoke involuntary memories that – like Proust’s famous madeleine – take us back to the warmer, safer world of childhood. Restaurants can be very grown-up places, offering dishes of intense complexity and challenging flavours, but after the main-course plates have been cleared we enter the playground of the increasingly creative pastry chefs, and we can all be children again. • the fried 78 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
