Italians with a sweet tooth and practical Americans: How popular desserts were born

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The simplest sweets known to mankind are fruits and berries. We still eat them with great pleasure. But a person is not used to being content with small things, and over time he invented many desserts, each sweeter and more intricate than the other.

Sweet chocolate

Initially, among the inhabitants of tropical America, chocolate was a drink and only for real men - it was prepared with the addition of pepper and drank cold and slightly fermented. The recipe for chocolate was brought to Europe along with the cocoa beans Cortez.

Over time, Catholic monks and nuns began experimenting with the drink, trying to maximize its taste. Thanks to them, by the seventeenth century, chocolate became hot and sweet. At that time coffee was unknown to Europeans, tea was even more expensive than cocoa, so chocolate became the most popular hot drink.

He still did not look the same as now. During cooking, it was whipped, and was not made from powder, but from whole beans, and because of the cocoa butter, the drink was very fatty. The oil film was removed with a spoon.

And hard chocolate was invented in the nineteenth century by the Dutch chemist Konrad van Guten. For starters, he learned how to separate oil from the crushed beans. The resulting powder was much more soluble in water. If cocoa butter was added to the hot finished chocolate drink again, the chocolate would harden. The British came up with the idea of making bars of such hardened chocolate, and the Swiss - adding powdered milk to them.

Chocolate eggs

The Surprise Chocolate Egg was originally conceived as easter delicacy … That is, it depicts a real painted egg. Therefore, the container inside is yellow - this is the yolk, and the layer of white chocolate is the protein.

But before, chocolate eggs were simpler, with no containers and no white layer. But a surprise was invested in them already in the nineteenth century. Eggs without surprises have been made even before, filling a real shell with chocolate, like a mold. This delicacy was popular at the French court.

Praline

Praline was invented by the chef of the Duke of Plessis-Praline Clement Jalusot in the eighteenth century. According to legend, the duke asked to surprise his guests with some special dessert, and Jalusot tried in an unusual way to combine two expensive delicacies - almonds and sugar. He fried them together and got caramelized nuts. The dish pleased both the Duke and his guests.

Initially, pralines were eaten by themselves, like our kozinaki. Actually, often foreigners who taste kozinaki are sure that they are eating it. When the praline reached the United States, the recipe was changed to match local produce. So pecans became the basis of American pralines, and caramel was eventually replaced by thick cream.

And in the nineteenth century, confectioners came up with the use of chopped nuts and sugar or caramel filling in sweets. Sweets with just such a filling are still so popular in Europe that in some languages "praline" means a sweet filling in general. Although confectioners and food lovers, of course, remember how real praline should be. In addition to sweets, pralines are added to ice cream and cakes. Very often chocolate is added to pralines in such cases.

Dessert "Pavlova"

It is not clear who and when invented to combine strawberries with cream, but it is known when a dessert named after the famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova was invented on its basis. This happened in the twenties of the last century, when the ballet star performed abroad. True, Australia and New Zealand are arguing about whose chef was so inspired by Pavlova's dance that he came up with a dessert in her honor.

The peculiarity of the dessert, which is something like a cake with a lot of whipped cream and strawberries, is the complete absence of flour. It is based on a meringue, which is as white and airy as a ballerina's tutu. In addition to strawberries, the cake is usually decorated with raspberries and mint leaves. One of the legends around the dessert says that Pavlova really dreamed of eating a whole cake one day, but could not afford flour - she had to keep herself in shape. So a chef, Australian or New Zealand, came up with a "cake" that doesn't have a single gram of flour.

Merengi (meringue)

For the first time the word "meringue", together with a recognizable recipe, is found in a French cookbook of 1692. By the way, the French still use this word, because another name, "meringue", literally translates "kiss". The French considered such a name obscene, but the Russians found it more romantic.

Macaroons

This trendy dessert combines the lightness of meringue with the almond flavors of other classic desserts like marzipan or praline. It is like a cookie and a cake at the same time: two dry, weightless halves of almond flour, egg whites and sugar are combined with a layer of sweet cream or jam.

In Europe, macarons sold from France, and in France itself, according to one version, they arrived with Queen Catherine de Medici, who adores sweets, from Italy. Since macaroons are similar to marzipans, another Italian delicacy made from almond flour and sugar, it's not hard to believe.

Ice cream

Another dessert that came to France with Catherine de Medici. But he had a long way to go to Italy. As early as twenty centuries BC, pomegranate seeds and pieces of fruit mixed with ice were already served in China. They loved to cool various drinks and desserts with ice in Ancient Persia, Ancient Rome, in India during the Mughal dynasty.

It is believed that the ice cream recipe was brought to Italy from China by the traveler Marco Polo. And the first ice cream recipe published in the book was placed in an English culinary collection of 1718. In Russia, ice cream based on cream, berries and chocolate began to be made at the end of the eighteenth century. The dish was, of course, very expensive.

Sweet jelly

Common meat and fish jelly (that is, jellied meat) was known to Europeans back in the Middle Ages. To obtain it, foods with a high collagen content, for example, chicken legs, pork ears, or sturgeon swim bladders, were digested for a long time. But in order to make a dessert, it was necessary to first invent a form of gelatin, which would be diluted with hot water simply and quickly. It happened at the end of the nineteenth century.

An American named Pearl Waite looked at the gelatin and thought that maybe if you add color and sugar to it, you get an interesting new dessert. The final product was bright purple and people were downright afraid to try it. Waite had to sell the patent to the first who did not mind - his neighbor named Woodward.

At first, Woodward was also unable to push the strange new product onto the market. On reflection, he made an enticing ad in which colorful jelly in pretty glasses was served on a silver tray to various famous actresses. From “strange” the dessert immediately turned into “unusual”, and this, in a way, is a completely different matter. In addition, Waite made sure that any housewife could easily recognize and implement a jelly recipe based on any fruits or berries.

In modern store-bought jelly, instead of animal gelatin, its plant analogue from algae, agar-agar, is most often used. True, the popularity of the dessert itself has been steadily declining over the past half century. To many, he seems "unnatural". Of course, the children still love him, but the parents ultimately choose.

The most fantastic types of desserts are possible nowadays. For example, children's half a million dollar cake with diamonds and diamonds.