Recipe - Information: Sweet Dishes

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WESTERNERS in Chinese restaurants, after being delighted with the variety
of "main" courses, often find the desserts limited and disappointing.
There's a good reason for this: it's not the Chinese custom to serve any
dessert with a meal. Sweet dishes are for snacks or for banquets.

The snacks, served at all hours, usually with cups of tea, include fruits
and nuts, cakes and cookies, gelatinous dishes and hot fruit or nut
liquidsranging from thin and delicate to thick and puddinglikewhich
are known as teas or soups.

The elaborate desserts are reserved for banquets. These include Eight
Precious Rice Pudding, Peking Dust and Almond Float. Various fruit and nut
teas or soups are often also served. These are sipped from large teacups
between courses or at the very end of the banquet.

Cakes prepared at home, such as sponge cake and red date cake, are not
baked but steamed. Baked pastries, and particularly the special ones eaten
during holidays and festival times, are usually bought at Chinese bakeries.
These include the globular riceflour cakes, that are stuffed with a sweet
bean filling, rolled in sesame seeds, and eaten during the Chinese New
Year. There are also small baked cakes (filled with lotus jama thick
mixture of lotus seeds boiled with sugarsweet bean fillings, sesame seeds
and preserved melon), which are eaten during the moon festival in
midAugust.

The fortune cookie, unknown in China, seems to be Westerninspired,
although its origins are obscure. Fortune cookies are not baked, but
dropped by the spoonful onto a hot grill to form thin, round wafers. While
still warm and pliable, each wafer is topped with a strip of paper that has
a "fortune" printed on it. The wafer is then folded in half and in half
again to enclose its "fortune." When cooled, the cookie hardens and holds
its convoluted shape.

From The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook, ISBN 0517658704. Downloaded
from Glen's MM Recipe Archive, http://www.erols.com/hosey.