Sweet things

London, 29 September, 2011 – I have all my teeth. I have no fillings. Never having been weaned on fizzy drinks and sweets, mine is an anchovy tooth, all savoury and salty. Yet I am staring at preening ciabatta – stale until a few minutes ago, now puffed up having absorbed whipping cream and egg yolks and a lot of sugar. One side glows, already a healthy dark brown. The underside froths in butter, turning caramel too.

In another pan slices of apple also bask in butter, and more sugar and more double cream – Granny Smith segments which were crisp and sharp, now shrunk and lissom and very, very sweet. Also on the hob, in a smaller pan, custard settles and thickens. The aroma from the custard, and the all-enveloping smell of the past three weeks, vanilla infusing.

Since the farm I have craved sweetness. But the craving is quite specific, the need to punctuate every meal with a sweet thing, coming on strong at that point when ordinarily I would stop eating. It is as though I have found an extra, quite unnecessary, dimension of hunger, or discovered an extra stomach. (Cows are said to have four. Is there one specially for brioche?)

Fruit fails to satisfy the craving. After an apple I found myself making a hopeful trip to the fridge in search of something sugary. My loose morals. My loosening molars. Will power has desserted me. The other night there was a journey to the supermarket just to buy ice cream. And last week, with an hour spare and pondering cookbooks in Waterstones, I caught myself, remembered the viscid vicarious trap, and so went off to Soho, for a splendid hazelnut and chocolate ice cream.

On the supermarket trip I came back with Bonne Marche’s Madelines too, which were not bad, not great, slightly bland and mouth-expanding, but which did keep the cupboard stocked for a couple of nights. (“Best to keep the wolf from the dwarf,” as the Maximalist once charmingly told me.) An altogether better sponge came in the form of a homemade lemon pudding. It emerged as a golden floe floating on molten, piping hot lemon curd, the tartness off set, and hence sweetened, with ever so slightly acidic, and very glacial, crème fraiche.

Wanting to get a grip on this slippery slope, and thinking that I might somehow bridge my tastes back to solid, savoury ground, I made a tart filled with dark chocolate and dark, dried, organic apricots. A desert in name, but bitter and intense, and yes, almost satisfying. But more than anything, fuelling my appetite for more, and for more sweet things.

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Most of the baking in my life has been bread. Hardy, rustic loaves at that, not brioche or mille-feuille. I have been known to make puddings, and when offered I certainly don’t turn them down, tucking in with the gusto of the most besotted pudding-lover. Seldom do I bake for myself, however. Rarely do I steal coy glances towards the confectionary counter. But this craving: the plotting and planning of puddings, that is what it has called out for.

With mellow honey and vanilla pervading the house, there has been the perfect, if heady, atmosphere to think about my ambivalence towards sweet things. For all my love of food, and wholehearted belief in eating for the sheer pleasure of it, this would seem to be blind spot. A truly indulgent aspect of food which I have resisted and rebuffed. Why have I spurned deserts? Why the ‘take it or leave it’ attitude, when, in almost everything else, I know my mind to the point of being wilfully polemical?

There is no one simple answer, but Camus says somewhere that real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present. Which seems indisputable, except that giving your all to the main course can leave little room for pudding. The proof, for me, has always been in the savoury. Other tests are available, it seems. Plainly, it is time to expand the repertoire.

And so, pain perdu, stewed apples and custard. And so all the other sweet things.

Pain perdu is a dish of thriftily rescuing and using up, however. It is Pappa al pomodoro’s sweet sibling. But now I see that there is another side to dessert, the side which brooks no denial. At root, every pudding is an added extra, an indulgence that goes beyond, an enjoyment of more at that time when the ascetic savoury eater thinks he should be full. The spirit of going one step beyond calls for a celebration and a desert that will set, setting on a new course.

With its velvety sumptuous creaminess this is the standard to be blazed for all puddings. A pudding that is the epitome of the choice of pleasure over wisdom.

Panna cotta, and with it I’ll have the transformational, the ancient quince. Thought likely to have been the Golden Apple with which Aphrodite rewarded Paris’s good taste, the knobbly fruit that launched a thousand spectacular dishes. Quince in all their bulging virtuosity, gladly, if slowly, methodically, transmogrified into whatever you wish. Silky, sweet and crimson; auburn and spiced with cinnamon; peppery and succulent in a sharp blue cheese salad, but texturally, always quintessentially quince.

Mine have a fine light brown pelage. Brushing the fur off, smooth yellow skin shines through. The fruit so hard that it almost creaks as cut. Over many hours they poach in a nectar of honey, vanilla and lemon.

From the fridge, upturned and tapped out, the trembling panna cotta freckled with vanilla seeds. Is there any more misleading, more culinary insulting phrase than ‘plain vanilla’? A wonderful warm wallop of vanilla, and sumptuous, light and delicate cream and the quince and cool amber syrup. Such a long way from marmite, wasabi and anchovies.