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Desserts

Sweet rice

This is not to say that the Chinese do not like sweet things. It is just that sweet things are taken separately from a meal or as part of a meal, rather than at the conclusion of it. Dim sum, with its combination of sweet and savory dishes in no particular order, is a good example of this. Dishes are served when they are ready, rather than according to an ordering code. At a Western-style buffet, Chinese guests readily arrange sweet and savory items together on the plate, with no notion of courses.

Sweet dishes can also be a result of adding sugar to a savory item: for example, red beans, lotus seeds and white fungus are all turned into sweet soups when we might normally expect to eat them with salt. Even potato can be turned into a sugary snack. Other desserts are treated merely as snacks and are available on the streets at almost any time of day. Sweet buns are everywhere and glutinous rice flour is used to make delicious little dumplings, which can be steamed in a ginger sauce. Glutinous rice shows up frequently, either steamed into a pudding or cooked in a soup. Dried fruits such as dates, kumquats and prunes are eaten alone like sweets (and may even be salted as well), or incorporated in rice or sweet soup creations.

Certainly baked goods, like fortune cookies, Almond Biscuits and all kinds of tarts and pastries are recent additions to the repertoire, since traditional Chinese kitchens did not have ovens. The use of dairy products can be traced to the Portuguese influence in Macau (and to a lesser extent the British in Hong Kong). In Guangdong Province, sweet, set milk puddings are a favorite and the province's culinary capital of Shunde (where the top Cantonese chefs traditionally hail from) still has little tea shops specializing in these set puddings. Today, French-inspired cakes and gateaux are favorites for birthdays and other celebrations, although the king of them all is the Portuguese egg tart.

Fruit icecream

The most likely dessert is simply fresh fruit, the more seasonal the better. Most often it is served in chunks without embellishment, not even sugar, and sometimes a little under-ripe. Indeed, it would be hard to beat a slice of watermelon or some lychees, still in their hard skins, on a steaming summer's day. And it is worth remembering that fruits such as oranges, persimmons, tangerines, plums and peaches were all introduced to the West from China.