Adam Gopnik has an excellent article in last weeks New Yorker which he calls Sweet Revolution in which he examines the way Dessets (the course which we used to call Pudding ) are going today- particularly as made by Catalan pastry chefs like Jordi Butron and Albert Adria, pastry chef to his more famous brother , Ferran, from El Bulli .

These chefs are doing some really exciting (and difficult ) things with the dessert menu, some of it which quite breaks down the line between savoury and sweet.

When Gopnik put exactly this question to Adria he got the following reply;

“He (Ferran Adria) looked at me with delighted triumph ‘-“It can’t be an American that is asking me that !” he said. “A hamburger with ketchup and Coca-Cola ? That’s the most intense symbiosis of sweet and savoury imaginable. It’s your cultural theme”

But before we get all sniffy about the American love of sweetness with all savoury products let us have a look at our own eating heritage.

Given that we adopted the cranberry with the turkey from the Americas that probably doesn’t count, but , we did always eat apple sauce with our more traditional goose , and intense sweet and sharp mint sauce with our lamb. The French have always loved the sweetness of redcurrant jelly with their lamb, have sneaked sugar into their petits pois and associate the gooseberry with mackerel to such an extent that they have named the fruit after the fish.
I had some American friends in Waterford who used to feed us bacon with pancakes dribbled with maple syrup for breakfast which is a marriage, my taste buds think, made in heaven and let us not forget apple sauce with pork, honey glazed ham, our enjoyment of sweet mango chutney with a curry and the modern, and delicious, fashion of adding flakes of sea salt to caramel.
We have been mixing sweet with savoury for years.
Therefore these modern chefs with their snail custard and parmesan ice cream are merely taking this combination a little further.

Let us remember our own tradition was to end the meal with a Savoury , something with the salt tang of bacon or anchovies. These we ate after dessert and indeed in our tradition, after cheese.
As always when we look at any changes in fashion – in food as in clothes-we are only watching the world turn.
Plus ca change…..