How common is the practice of eating dessert?

August 17, 2006 10:08 PM

How common is the practice of eating dessert?

Like lots of Westerners, I'm accustomed to eating something sweet at the end of a meal. Is that habit unique to European countries (and the places they colonized), or is it universal? It's hard for me to judge, since most non-Western cultures are now influenced by Western practices anyway, so I'm not sure what's native and what's acquired.

What I'm getting at is: is there something innately pleasing about consuming something sugary after a meal (because glucose is easy to digest or something), or is it just an arbitrary custom that caugt on?

posted by molybdenum to food & drink (19 comments total)

My personal experience in Russia (mostly in the Kaluga Region) is that it's customary to drink sweetened tea and eat some chocolates, pies, or cookies after meals.

Wikipedia, predictably, has a small mention of other cultures.

Which part of the question is really your question, though? You might want to clarify. Are you really asking if sweets make you feel better or make a meal more satisfying? Those are both questions in themselves --because yes, heightened blood sugar (or normalized blood sugar) can lead to feelings of well-being (for lack of a better word).

Conversely, low blood sugar can lead to irritability, which might suggest something unpleasant about *not* having something sweet.
posted by fake at 10:20 PM on August 17, 2006

I should have been clearer: my question is just, what explains the phenomenon of dessert? Is it inherently pleasant? If the practice is universal, that would suggest that it is. But if it's just a feature of European culture, then maybe it's simply a quirk, like using a fork instead of chopsticks.

I asked how common it is just as a data point to determine whether it's inherently pleasing.
posted by molybdenum at 10:32 PM on August 17, 2006

From what I understand (not a primary source here) dessert after a meal is not a traditional thing in Chinese culture. Also, I can pretty much vouch for dessert in Japan not traditionally being eaten (indigenous Japanese sweets are almost universally to be eaten with tea as a sort of snack, not something to be eaten after a meal). However, Japan has many more sweet main-course non-desserts.
posted by Bugbread at 10:42 PM on August 17, 2006

Such eating which the French call desert, is unnaturall.
1666. Pepys Diary

Much more here.
posted by vacapinta at 10:59 PM on August 17, 2006

Indians (says the one resident in my house) eat sweets alongside a meal, but not after it.
posted by anjamu at 11:29 PM on August 17, 2006

is there something innately pleasing about consuming something sugary after a meal

The order is natural. Dessert is a luxury, not a dish of sustenance, so it comes last. And everyone loves a sweet treat -- being sweet is part of what makes it a treat, what sets it apart from the main courses. But first you've got to fill up on a heap of what you have to eat to stay alive, and then, if you're lucky, comes a dollop of the biologically unnecessary but rare and almost too tasty part of the meal.
posted by pracowity at 2:20 AM on August 18, 2006

pracowity : "The order is natural. Dessert is a luxury, not a dish of sustenance, so it comes last."

Er, so in the cultures where sweet stuff is eaten with the meal, instead of after it, what causes this unnaturalness?
posted by Bugbread at 4:29 AM on August 18, 2006

The order is natural. Dessert is a luxury, not a dish of sustenance, so it comes last.

I.e., Euro-American culture is universal and basic, and anything that deviates is unnatural. Is that what you're saying?
posted by languagehat at 5:31 AM on August 18, 2006

I noticed in Austria that cakes (tortes) were more often served in cafes rather than restaurants--which had other types of dessert on the menu.
posted by brujita at 5:39 AM on August 18, 2006

I've heard that eating something sweet tells your stomach or your brain or some part of your body that you're done eating. Personally, once I've eaten something sweet, it's hard to go back to eating something savory or salty again.
posted by hooray at 5:47 AM on August 18, 2006

My experience in some West African villages (Senegal, Guinea primarily, and Mali) was that dessert was not customary after meals. I saw men consume thimbles full of attaya (sickeningly sugary tea) all day long, and on market day people would have bon bon (flavored sweet ice balls), or other sweets like beignets. Breakfast - if not reheated rice from the night before - was often a very sweet rice pudding. Sometimes people would eat cough drops throughout the day, or oranges or other fruit, or avocados with sugar, as snacks throughout the day. But I hardly ever (ever?) saw anyone in a village eat sweets as a digestif after a meal. The really favored treat - and I did see people eat this after a meal - was the kola nut - very bitter nut packed full of caffeine.

I also spent some time in very rural Mexican village, and I didn't see sweets after meals there either, but it's been a while and I could have missed something like that then.
posted by Amizu at 6:25 AM on August 18, 2006

hooray: I've heard that eating something sweet tells your stomach or your brain or some part of your body that you're done eating. Personally, once I've eaten something sweet, it's hard to go back to eating something savory or salty again.

I suspect that this is not biological, but is conditioning. If you regularly eat dessert after your meals, your body begins to associate a sweet taste with a full belly. When I was growing up, we used to always buy chocolate mints when leaving our local Mexican food restaurant. Now, as an adult, I crave chocolate mints after eating certain Mexican foods.
posted by donajo at 6:51 AM on August 18, 2006

The order is natural. Dessert is a luxury, not a dish of sustenance, so it comes last. And everyone loves a sweet treat -- being sweet is part of what makes it a treat, what sets it apart from the main courses. But first you've got to fill up on a heap of what you have to eat to stay alive, and then, if you're lucky, comes a dollop of the biologically unnecessary but rare and almost too tasty part of the meal.

Please don't just make stuff up.

When I visited China, after meals we usually had either hot tofu, or fruit and little dough balls filled with bean paste, in a mildly sweet syrup. Both the tofu and the bean paste dishes reminded me of soup, but sweet instead of salty. These were definitely desserts.

Just like here we didn't eat these for regular meals, just the more formal ones--all the New Year's big-family-get-together dinners, mainly.
posted by Khalad at 7:19 AM on August 18, 2006

The order is natural. Dessert is a luxury, not a dish of sustenance, so it comes last.

I've heard people argue, however, that eating dessert before your regular meal is better for you with regards to blood sugar regulation, dental health, etc.. is there any mileage in this?
posted by wackybrit at 8:36 AM on August 18, 2006

My family is Mexican, and before I started interacting a lot with 100% American people (at lunch, dinner, parties) in college, I never had a dessert after a meal. It still feels like an unnecessary indulgence/expense, but it's tasty.
posted by lychee at 8:49 AM on August 18, 2006

American here. We never had dessert immediately after a meal when I was growing up, though sometimes we had sweets much later in the evening. My Mom called it a "midnight snack." As a grown-up, I still have no desire for dessert at the end of the meal.
posted by Robert Angelo at 9:08 AM on August 18, 2006

I'm from the Southern part of the United States. While we did have dessert after meals when I was a kid, especially when visiting our grandparents, we were MUCH more likely to have some fresh fruit from the garden. Which was invariably sweet. Maybe that's where the custom comes from?

So, if Mr. Pepys is right, and the serving of 'dessert' was at one point foreign to English cuisine, when did it enter the cuisine?
posted by geekhorde at 11:06 AM on August 18, 2006

Raised in California, and my family generally didn't eat dessert right after a meal - we ate dinner at 5 with "snack time" around 7:30.
posted by muddgirl at 11:28 AM on August 18, 2006

This is relatively new, coming about at the 17th Century. Prior to that, everything trended to be mixed together in a stew/mush/pudding. As nutrition improved at the close of the Middle Ages, and the central metaphor for / understanding of digestion changed from "the stomach cooks food" to "the stomach ferments food", the sweet portion was separated out and made optional. See The Birth of the Modern Diet [pdf]
posted by orthogonality at 6:38 PM on August 18, 2006