Megan McArdle: belief

Transcript context

…The first thing to point out is that Chinese don’t have dessert as a course. You finish with fruit, usually. Sweet dishes tend to be either incidental snacks between meals, or something you have with tea, or you might have a mingling of sweet and savory dishes. You can have some sweet dishes with quite a lot of sugar in them. There are also some regions where they have a lot of sweet foods. Suzhou and Wuxi in the Jiangnan region, for example, or the Chaozhou region of the Cantonese South. There are a whole range of wonderful, sweet pastries. Rice-based in the south, wheat-based in the north. For me, you know, as a great advocate of Chinese cooking, and I do have to admit that the desserts and sweet things is possibly one aspect in which Western cuisines might have the edge. [laughter] I think that’s because of the use of dairy products. You get the wonderful, umami richness of butter, the textures of cream. Chocolate, of course, is not used traditionally in China. Those things, if you take them out of Western desserts, you’re not left with very much in a way. In China, a lot of the desserts, also they’re less sweet. People have less of a sweet tooth apart from a few regions. You have things like sweet meats based on dried beans like mung beans or sweet potatoes. And they’re actually very delicious. They don’t hit that extreme sweet spot that Westerners like for their dessert. Could I ask a follow-up? Dairy, obviously, I know if you’re lactose intolerant as many Asians are, drinking milk is probably never going to happen, I agree with you. I don’t drink milk either, and my family are dairy farmers. [laughter] But all of this dairy in Western cuisine, and you see — I grew up in New York City, and even so, if I look at the range of exotic ingredients that were available even to me, shopping in what was then the best food city in the US, and what is available now, it’s just so much better. I think that’s true all over the world. I still remember eating Mexican food in London in the ’90s, and that was a bad, bad, bad, experience. [laughter] I have British friends who swear that now, it’s different. Don’t believe them. [laughter]…

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