DESSERT DELIGHTS & PREJUDICES

A magnificent dessert has many jobs to do.

Not just to end a meal.

Aren’t there those for which you’d get up in the middle of the night or travel fifty miles at any time of the day? Even have for breakfast if there were any left over? Whichever of them, their most important task is to have your or your guests leave the feeling that, after all, all is well with the world.

These days a daunting task.

In that search I will look back a bit.

One night in 1950 my father announced we were going around the world on a ship. “The world” was still a vague concept in my mind, but missing two months of school was splendidly unambiguous. I announced to the school’s head priest that I was seriously out of there, bound for Ceylon, India, the Red Sea, Egypt, Italy, New York, and San Francisco, before returning to Sydney.

The ship to India was Italian and brand-new. It would have made a fine steamer on Lake Como, but our first major storm in the Great Australian Bight nearly upended it. Many people were badly injured, the captain was seasick, and I begged for someone to kill me after smelling the banana oil used to clean up someone’s smashed bottle of nail polish in the corridor outside my cabin.

That did it for me with cooked banana desserts, Mr. Foster’s delicious dessert notwithstanding.

Taking pity on me for the pounds I’d lost after three days of not eating, our stewardess Maria wheeled in a dish of eggs shirred in garlic and green Neapolitan olive oil. Green is what I turned, and she took it personally when I threw up on the spot. After the upheavals, all I could think of was cereal and cold milk. The only milk onboard was canned unsweetened condensed milk, and after one taste of that on cornflakes (the only choice for twenty- eight days), I gave up in disgust. It was a disappointment all the more felt because I loved sweetened canned milk. Australian food lore, born out of deprivation, had designated sweetened condensed milk, cooked in boiling water while still in the can, a national delicacy. And it was, though one could hardly call the fabulous ensuing goo delicate. Its name now is dulce de leche. Then it was just what every kid begged for. Probably because it is as sweet as anything can be.

And it was my first solo attempt at cooking.

Photo Courtesy of SBS.com