So you might be thinking to yourself, “didn’t he do caramel last time?” and you’d be right, gentle reader, quite right. But just because caramel is principally sugar and butter doesn’t mean this is a lame repetition of the same subject. This is no dolled-up retread. I’m not feeding you Dunkin’ Donuts here (meaning this article wasn’t prepared by unwashed hands, with weevil-infested flour, then dolloped into used and reused oil vats, and a final dunkin’ in some fructose syrup before sale and consumption twelve days later).
The idea this time is to further the idea of component parts – first dessert, then caramel, now sugar. The idea of pastry as sweet things. In the culinary world, you have two departments: pastry and savory. By definition, pastry is the sweet counterpoint to savory dishes. Sure, there are a few savory desserts. Cheese and 99% chocolate have barely any sugar, sex is usually salty, and any number of savory ingredients can compliment traditional dishes, like olive oil gelato, salted bacon and caramel, and rosemary or basil on chocolate cakes.
But bottom line – what we talk about when we talk about dessert . . . is sugar. We’re talking about a substance here, as an additive (versus internal sugar, such as in fruits) that has absolutely zero nutritional value. None. In fact, when you add sugar to something, especially white refined sugar, you increase sweetness obviously, but also calories, your chances of obesity, tooth decay, adult onset diabetes, cancer, and even gout. Or is it gout, and even cancer? The point is, holy poops that is a lot of bad things. Gout? I’m not even clear on what that is exactly. I just know to be afraid.
There is absolutely nothing about sugar that is good for you. We’ve had plenty of powder puff studies telling us a piece of dark chocolate or a glass of wine is good for your heart. But it would take a special kind of pseudo-science to claim sugar does anything to your body other than make things tasty and then promptly go down and mess shit up.
If pastry chefs had a Hippocratic Oath, it’d be, “First do some harm, then maybe add Chantilly cream.”
The one consolation is that at least you can use Splenda in your macchiatto now. First of all, it dissolves better, is sweeter, and isn’t processed with animal bones (oh vegans, what more will be taken from your diet of pine nuts and Play-Doh spaghetti?). The usual knock against artificial sweeteners is the ole’ cancer-giving possibility. And they might do that; who really knows? But so does regular sugar. And so does New York air. And stress. And anything involving Jennifer Lopez.
The problem is scientists couldn’t force feed mice their entire body weight in off-brand clothing lines and second-tier rom-coms, so they went with Splenda. And what do you know, cancer. Basically we learned that if you eat your body weight in anything, even blessed Eucharist, you get sick. I’m no Niels Bohr, but I think I saw that one coming.
Also on the subject of sugar: slavery. No other food product has such a close connection to the insufferable cruelty perpetrated on an entire people group (Sugar Daddys seem mildly sexist and racist now that I think about it, and Sno-Cone stands usually make fun of Eskimos in some way, but they’re no sugar cane).
A kitchen-friend of mine told me about a pastry chef who refused to bake with refined cane sugar. She called it “the blood of the slaves.” Of course, that meant she could only use brown sugar, and gourmet raw sugars like muscovado, which runs about fifteen times more expensive that regular white (and could make a spare tire taste like a danish).
And with all that, I’m actually still a fan of sugar. With just sugar, milk, eggs, and flour, you can make just about 60% percent of the desserts known to man (statistic completely made up, but number is high). With it you can glaze, caramelize, thicken, and enhance natural sugars (it’s the secret ingredient to many a chili and pasta sauce). When you put sprinkles on an iced cookie, you’re pretty much decorating sugar with sugar. Sorbets are frozen fruit juice without it. Rice pudding would taste like rice paste. Lemonade would be lemons.
It is the only preservative you should use in making jams, jellies, or fruit preserves. It was noble in its ability to save frontiers people from food spoilage. Sugarlips is a cute thing to call someone in the workplace. Candy, Candi, and Candee, are all great names for your daughter. Sugar and spice are part of everything nice.
See, sugar can be good for you. Good for your soul. I’d much rather have Lemon Mascarpone Crepes for the Soul than frumpy chicken soup. Cream of chicken, maybe, if paired with a nice zucchini bread, and a sugar crumble topping.
Consider, for example, that sugar and salt are the only two ingredients we have that are pure in their flavor. This is how chefs break down their dishes and discuss how to improve them, using the science of “flavor profiles.” The tongue can only taste sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory (savory is a little abstract, and we’ll deal with it later). The rest of the flavor combinations you perceive (tangy, citrusy, buttery) are mostly because of your sense of smell.
Sugar, then, is fundamental. It is the principal element of dessert. If you ask a judge what his job is in one word, it’s probably “discern”. A doctor would be, “heal”. A televangelist, “swindle”, and a politician, “televangelize”.
And a pastry chef, “sweeten”. If it was a phrase, it’d be, “Ask for dental.”
