Dessert Is Important

Count your calories, count your carbs, count your points, and count your blessings.  Food is fuel to keep you alive and you eat to live, rather than living to eat.  So you read everything you can about antioxidents, superfoods, unsaturated everything, Omega-3 this, organic that, and maybe that’s what you’ve got to do.  Pleasure is only part of the eating experience isn’t it?  Eat or die, after all.  Well, except for dessert, of course.  Nobody needs desserts to do jack.  We are talking about the sole gastronomical experience in human life meant for the sole purpose of pleasure.  That in mind, why would you ever eat a dessert that was just okay?  The very soul of luxury is in play and you would consume the very soul of mediocrity.  Let’s be very clear here.  It is beyond excuse.  Here is the kind of thing you should experience when you have your dessert.  Vanilla should take you away to a place both tropical and floral where the familiar and fantastic merge like a perfect dream.  Chocolate should taste like the soul of an Easter bunny and all the magic and intoxicating ecstasy should flow over the tongue making you grateful for your good fortune to have lived long enough to taste it.  Strawberry should taste of the essence of spring with rebirth and rejuvenation as real a sensation across the tongue as the feel of the newly green grass against the feet.  Lemon should taste fresh and clean, like all the energy involved in photosynthesis became capable of detection by scent.  Whatever you taste and whatever you feel, you should taste and feel something and it should be something that you care about tasting and feeling.  A good dessert will activate the whole emotional spectrum.  Rage at the bad taste in the mouth all the imitators that came before have left lingering.  Avarice at the notion that sharing is even slightly acceptable.  Fear that it might never be this good again.  Will that you will learn to make something this good yourself.  Hope that quality desserts live in an age of mediocrity.  Love for the dessert and the unique experience it brings you.  Compassion for those who haven’t the slightest idea what a real dessert is.  So what’s it going to be?  You can spend your whole life eating sugar frosted cardboard with the shelflife of uranium 390, big tubs of ice cream more air than food, or frozen cheesecake made a lifetime away and served frozen by the slice, or you can have something else.  You can have something special.  You can be reminded why kids the world over ask mom what’s for dessert, why people will buy even bad versions of what they seek, and why Moses wasn’t promised a land of milk and steaks.  Put down your mediocre pile of sugar.  Eat some dessert that you will say without the slightest hesitation or timidity tastes really freaking’ good.

-Frank