History of Dessert
Sweets were fed to the gods in ancient Mesopotamia and India and other ancient civilizations. Dried fruit and honey were likely the first sweeteners used in most of the world, but the spread of sugarcane around the world was essential to the development of dessert.
Sugarcane was grown and refined in India before 500 BCE and was crystallized, making it easy to transport, by 500 CE. Sugar and sugarcane were traded, making sugar available to Macedonia by 300 BCE and China by 600 CE. In South Asia, the Middle East and China, sugar has been a staple of cooking and desserts for over a thousand years. Sugarcane and sugar were little known and rare in Europe until the twelfth century or later, when the Crusades and then colonialization spread its use.
Europeans began to manufacture sugar in the Middle Ages, and more sweet desserts became available. Even then sugar was so expensive usually only the wealthy could indulge on special occasions. The first apple pie recipe was published in 1381.
Medieval "Issue de Table"
The term "dessert" comes from the Old French desservir, "to clear a table", literally "to un-serve", and originated during the Middle Ages. Medieval feasts contained 2-3 broad courses of a variety of dishes, with a mix of both savory and sweet. The two types of food were not separated like they are today. However, dessert evolved from the Medieval days from an exclusive and only occasionally offered end-of-meal special event called the Void, where sweets and drinks were offered to a select few dinner guests after a sumptuous feast. Voids were special and not always offered at all meals/feasts.
The meaning of the word void is similar to the meaning of desservir because the void consisted of the ritualized removal of (or voiding out of) all of the remains of the feast, even the table and chairs, presumably to make room for evening entertainments. The voidée is a court ritual of the medieval period, when the sovereign rose at the end of the meal to consume sugared anise and carraway seeds (dragées) and spiced wine (hippocras). As well as these medicinal aids to royal digestion, he also ate a wafer (gaufre) with the sweet wine, as a eucharist-like thanksgiving. After washing his hands the king then left the table, which was cleared. Both the verbs voider and desservir mean to clear the table - so dessert is a later synonym for voidée.
Initially, it would typically consist of dragées, candied aniseed or coriander seed, wafers and mulled wine (hypocras). In northern France, a wide assortment of waffles and wafers were eaten with cheese and hypocras or a sweet malmsey (type of wine) as issue de table ("departure from the table"). The ever-present candied ginger, coriander, aniseed and other spices were referred to as d'épices de chambre ("parlor spices") and were taken as digestables at the end of a meal to "close" the stomach.
The consumption of these “sugared spices” after meals was thought to promote the digestion. According to humoral theory, which then governed European medicine, the spices were “hot” and “dry,” while the sugar candy that coated them acted catalytically to speed and intensify their warming, drying effects. Thus they cleared the stomach of the cold, damp humors that supposedly filled it after eating, hindering its function, and the stomach, now warmed, could do its job. Sugared spices were medicines—they were prescribed by physicians—but they were also pleasant.
After the West assimilated Islamic medicine, in the late twelfth century, sugar became the most pervasive, most broadly efficacious drug in the medieval European pharmacy, and so anything principally constituted of sugar was very nearly a medicine.
By the Late Middle Ages, it could also include a host of sweets such as comfits, which were passed in a painted wooden coffer called a drageoir: candy-coated spices, seeds, and nuts; candied citrus peel, plant stalks, roots (like ginger), and nuts; crystallized flower petals and herb leaves, wafers, dry and wet suckets, fruit pastes, marchpane, sweetened spiced wines, and other such aids to digestion and energy enhancements.
Strange as it seems to us today, there was then no clear conceptual distinction between confectionery and preserving, on the one hand, and sugared drugs, on the other. Apothecaries sold, and physicians prescribed, sugar, sugared spices, candied lemon rind, and all sorts of other sugared dainties, including, in those lucky places that knew it, marzipan. Fondant, taffy, and even the fanciful sugar statuary brought out between courses at feasts were all considered medicines, their recipes recorded in medical manuscripts, not in cookbooks.
The 16th Century Banquet
During the next three centuries, the little service of sugared spices was expanded in different ways throughout Europe to include various other articles consisting of a “warming” substance coated with or cooked with sugar.
Medieval cooks to the elite added sugar to all sorts of dishes, including many where we today would not expect to find it, like fish stews or pastas. But medieval cooks used sugar in very small quantities, as a seasoning, typically to intensify the savor of so-called sweet spices such as ginger and cinnamon and to moderate the heat of hot spices such as pepper, cloves, and cubebs. Thus, very few medieval dishes tasted perceptibly sweet and even those that were sweet were by no means “sweet dishes” in modern terms. In the medieval West, sugar was conceptualized as a medicine and a seasoning. Before sweet dishes could emerge, sugar had to be reconceptualized as a thing that was also eaten, a food.
Bartolomeo Scappi’s magisterial cookbook of 1570, Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi , took Martino’s new thinking about sugar a giant step forward.5 In addition to seasoning many meat, vegetable, and pasta dishes with as much as half a pound of sugar, Scappi outlined many dishes in which sweetness was the predominant taste: fruit pies and tarts; sweet custards and cream dishes; all sorts of biscotti and cakes; and pastry-like conceits that made use of candied fruits or marzipan. In short, Scappi presented a repertory of sweet dishes.
Interestingly, Scappi placed a number of his recipes for sweet dishes in the final chapter of his cookbook, which covers cooking for invalids and the sick, likely because he believed these dishes were healthful. However, Scappi clearly did not believe that sweet dishes were merely health foods, for he makes liberal use of them in his dozens of luxurious dinner and supper menus. These menus open with platters of candied fruits and then unfold in alternating “kitchen courses” and “sideboard courses,” the former comprising hot dishes such as roasts and meat pies, the latter cold dishes that are more or less equally divided between pungent/salty offerings like salads and smoked or dried fish and sweets such as sugared clotted cream, sweet biscuits and cakes, and marzipan fancies.
The void eventually transformed into the fabulous Tudor banquets that Queen Elizabeth and the Tudors loved. These banquets were end of feast sweet courses where several dozen to hundreds of sweet dishes were placed in special rooms, houses, or gardens and were designed to both satisfy any diner's sweet tooth but also to astonish their senses with lavish sugar subtleties, sculptures, and numerous lit torches.
In the 16th century, a banquet was very different from our modern perception and stems from the medieval 'ceremony of the void'. After dinner, the guests would stand and drink sweet wine and spices while the table was cleared, or 'voided'. (Later in the 17th century 'void' would be replaced with the French 'dessert'.) During the 16th century, guests would no longer stand in the great chamber whilst the table was cleared and the room prepared for entertainment, but would retire to the parlour or banqueting room.
As sugar's remarkable powers as a preservative became more widely known during the Renaissance, the dragées were augmented with a vast range of conserves, candies and fruit pastes. When in season, fresh fruit and cream cheeses also became important features. As the nobility tended to imitate the sovereign, the custom gradually percolated down the social scale. However, as confectionery was an expensive luxury, the dessert remained an exclusive upper class practice. It also became an occasion for the noble lord to show off his status to important guests by encouraging his confectioner to create elaborate table decorations made from sugar paste (pastillage) and marzipan. An important Renaissance dessert would often feature allegorical figures of pastillage, sugar temples and colourful displays of artificial flowers.
Like their Muslim counterparts in Spain, the Arab conquerors of Sicily introduced a wide variety of new sweets and desserts that eventually found their way to the rest of Europe. Just like Montpellier, Sicily was once famous for its comfits, nougat candy (torrone, or turrón in Spanish) and almond clusters (confetti). From the south, the Arabs also brought the art of ice cream making that produced sorbet and several examples of sweet cakes and pastries; cassata alla Siciliana (from Arabic qas'ah, the term for the terra cotta bowl with which it was shaped), made from marzipan, sponge cake and sweetened ricotta and cannoli alla Siciliana, originally cappelli di turchi ("Turkish hats"), fried, chilled pastry tubes with a sweet cheese filling.
The 17th Century
By the time of Charles II’s ascension to the throne, in 1660, the price of English sugar had fallen to a small fraction of what it had been in 1600. As prices fell English sugar consumption rose in tandem and, critically, much of the increased consumption occurred within the middling classes. Thus Hannah Woolley, who styled herself as cookbook author and behavior advisor to the rising professional and merchant classes, provided a range of banqueting plans, from deluxe to cheap, in The Queen-like Closet (1672). “I am blamed by many for divulging these Secrets,” she wrote, referring to the highly privileged, who wished to keep banqueting secrets to themselves, “and again commended by others for my Love and Charity in so doing; but however I am better satisfied with imparting them, than to let them die with me. . . . ”
Once the hoi polloi were able to scrounge enough sugar to banquet, the elite who set banquet fashions began to lose their appetite for unremitting sugar meals. By the last third of the seventeenth century, the syrupy hippocras was often replaced by lighter fruit and flower wines, and the sugared medicinal tidbits that once covered banquet tables were relegated to a side dish or two. Marchpane, if served at all, came to the table as little knickknacks bought from a comfit-maker; the ancient spice bomb called gingerbread dwindled toward extinction. Hostesses retained their affection for fruit preserves, gelatin jellies, and biskets, but these “ate” differently now, for they were paired with sweet dairy dishes called “creams” and “butters” and with buttery little cakes that we today would call cookies.
England had long been a dairying culture, and milk, butter, and cheese had long been staple English foods. This being the case, it seems unsurprising that dairy foods gained favor at banquets, for all long-enduring foreign fashions eventually begin to naturalize in conformance with native tastes. Tudor and Stuart literature contains many references to dairy foods as the stalwart fare of country folk. In his 1542 health manual, Andrew Boorde describes cream eaten with berries as a “rural man’s ‘banquet’” (although he decries the combination on health grounds, claiming that “such banquets have put men in jeopardy of their lives.”) Fresh fruits, cream, and local iterations of butter-rich cakes were typical treats of outdoor country festivals like May Day, which Robert Herrick frames as an idyll of “Cakes and Creame” in his famed poem “Corinna’s Gone a Maying.”
The elite, meanwhile, enjoyed sophisticated dishes called creams in the lighter, sweeter, generally more delicate second course of dinner, which intermixed savory morsels like roasted songbirds, sauced lobster meat, and prime seasonal vegetables with creams and other sweets like gelatin jellies and fruit tarts. Since the elite English were already accustomed to eating creams at dinner, the inclusion of creams in banqueting was logical. Hostesses just had to make sure that the creams served in the banquet were “contrary from those at dinner,” as Hannah Woolley advises her readers in The Queen-Like Closet.
Buttery little cakes had begun to steal onto the banqueting scene even before the cachet of sugar had waned. In The English Hus-Wife, Gervase Markham outlined both the then-conventional sugary anise jumbles cribbed from Italy and “finer jumbals,” which he extoled as “more fine and curious than the former, and neerer to the taste of the Macaroone.” The groundbreaking feature of these “finer” jumbles was not the pounded almonds but the “halfe a dish of sweet butter” (six ounces, probably) they contained, along with “a little cream.” In modern terms, Markham’s almond jumbles were rich, crumbly butter cookies.
John Murrell finds room for almond jumbles in several otherwise sugary banquet bills of fare set forth in the 1623 edition of A Delightful Daily Exercise for Ladies and Gentlewomen. Murrell also includes two other cakes of similarly buttery composition, Counties Cakes and Shrewsbury Cakes, both of which were regional specialties. By the mid-seventeenth century, butter-laden jumbles—typically sans almonds—had almost completely routed their sugary, anise-flecked Italian predecessors at banquets, and Shrewsbury cakes had become banquet staples. The name “counties cakes” disappeared, but “sugar cakes” “fine cakes” and simply “cakes,” likewise banquet standbys, were much the same thing.
In the late seventeenth century, the banquet incorporated a startling novelty: the currant-studded Portugal cakes, likely named for the Portuguese queen consort of Charles II, Catherine of Braganza. While Portugal cakes were compositionally similar to the other buttery cakes, their slightly more liquid batter was beaten with the hand until light and fluffy and then baked in individual fancy tins, making, essentially, little currant pound cakes. Modern Anglo-American baking, with its buttery cookies (or, in England, biscuits) and buttery cakes, was emerging.
There is a reason that the banquet was flooded with new creams after 1650 and became, essentially, a repast of fruits and creams eaten with biscuits and buttery cakes. In the mid-seventeenth century, the French became Europe’s new culinary tastemakers, displacing the Italians. French recipes and French culinary ideas invaded elite English cooking, inaugurating an English vogue for French cuisine that would endure for the next three centuries. England received much of its first news of the new French cooking through three cookbooks associated with the revolutionary French chef François Pierre de la Varenne: Le Cuisinier François (1651), of which La Varenne is indisputably the author, and two later works often attributed to La Varenne but likely written by others, Le Pastissier François (1653) and Le Confiturier François (1660). Cuisinier and Pastissier were both promptly translated into English, and the former became a runaway bestseller. Confiturier was not translated into English, but many educated English people of the day knew enough French to read it and no doubt did.
The book revealed the secrets of the dazzling French collation, a derivative of the Renaissance Italian collation and thus a cousin of the English banquet. In addition to recipes for preserves, biscuits, macaroons, marzipan, and sweet beverages, which had long been the stuff of banqueting, the book included a chapter titled “Butters, Creams, and Dairy Stuff.” Beyond simply ratifying a fashion for dairy stuff at banquets, the French contributed many specific dishes and ideas. The new butters seem to have been mostly French, although inspired by the medieval pan-European almond butter. Burnt cream (that is, crème brûlée) and almond cream, too, are likely French (although some English people will argue about the former), and the white jellies and ice cream likely came to England under French auspices, although they are not French inventions. The molding and turning out of creams and jellies transformed the look of the banquet table. And beyond the dairy stuff, there were new French biscuits, forerunners of the eighteenth-century French biscuit craze that led the English to spell the word the French way while continuing to pronounce it as they always had. And let’s not forget lemonade, which La Varenne introduced to Anglo-America as a seventeenth-century French collation beverage.
Shortly before the turn of the eighteenth century yet another new-fangled French culinary idea, dessert, pervaded England. The word “dessert” fairly quickly routed the old word “banquet,” but not because early desserts were all that different from banquets in content. What had changed was the broader conception of sweet dishes. Through most of the seventeenth century, sweet dishes were considered special, so much so that even the elite often dispensed with a banqueting course at dinner on ordinary occasions. But as sugar became ever more affordable and familiar, the wealthier classes came to expect that any dinner should be “de-served” with a course of sweets.
17th Century Desserts
Elaborate 17th Century Dessert Tables
The Georgian Dessert Course (early 18th century)
By the time the Hanovers took over the British throne in the early 18th century (King George I began his rule in 1714), the idea of dining in the service a la francaise style was firmly entrenched among the nobility. This dining style somewhat resembles a Medieval feast because it consisted of 2-3 broad courses of multiple dishes placed on the table family-style. The food was laid out on the dining table in beautiful symmetrical patterns and diners served themselves and their seat-mates by carving at table and passing dishes to one another. Similar to the Medieval feast, savory and sweet dishes could be served within the same course.
If a third course was offered, it would usually be the official dessert course. However, the modern idea of dessert would not necessarily apply. Offerings such as sweetmeat tarts of all sorts, pies, cakes, or any other elaborate concoctions could have been served in either the dessert course or, more commonly, would have been served in the second course as sweet entremets. The official dessert course would include fruit, flower or chocolate flavored drops/pastils/"cakes" /bonbons or "bomboons"as they were sometimes known then, nuts, ices, creams, fritters, jellies, conserves, and/or other such sweet delights.
The French dividing line between sweet and salty encouraged new creations of pastries and confections. The segregation of sweet and savory encouraged specialization and sweets migrated to a separate course.
Victorian and Edwardian Service a la Russe (later 19th century)
Eventually, over the course of the 19th century, a new formal dining style emerged that supplanted the family-style French service where multiple dishes were arranged on the table to be passed from one diner to another. Instead, Russian service (service a la Russe) took over and became the expected type of service at all formal dinners. Russian service did away with family service and offered diners all foods for each course on individual plates served to each diner. Instead of 2-3 broad courses, now diners could expect at least seven or eight courses and sometimes more.
The change did not occur quickly and both styles co-existed for quite a long time. As a matter of fact, both styles still co-exit. For example, a holiday meal at home such as Christmas dinner is usually served in the French style with all the food placed on the table at once to be passed from one diner to another. On the other hand, when attending a formal event such as a wedding or a meal at many upscale restaurants, service a la Russe, is utilized where waiters bring each course out to each diner previously plated in the kitchen.
In service a la Russe, dessert, true to the meaning of its name (to clear the table), was still the very last course. However, this dessert course really just consisted of fruit, nuts and cheese. The sweetest course of rich cakes, creams, jellies, pies, etc. was actually served second-to-last. Of course, the 20th century brought about a variety of approaches to serving dessert, depending on the intention of the host; however, it is quite common to start with an appetizer, then move onto the main dish, and then end with a sweet dessert.
