While such classic desserts as puddings, pies and cakes may seem deeply ingrained in society, they’ve only been around the past few centuries, according to the late Richard Sax, author of “Classic Home Dessert,” a book regarded by many as the definitive source on comfort sweets. Before the emergence of desserts, “distinctions between sweet and savory dishes were hazy,” Sax wrote.
But even as modern chefs also experiment with unexpected savory ingredients—such as herbs, cheese and tomatoes—in their sweets, it’s the more traditional desserts that continue to win over most diners in restaurants ranging from fine dining to fast food.
“People associate home desserts with love expressed through food,” says Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food studies, who currently teaches food sociology at New York University. “All those delicious calories, and adults get to eat all they want of them.”
Still, she notes that people’s definitions of what makes a comfort dish vary by background and personal taste.
“I think there is a difference in what’s American comfort desserts and English comfort desserts,” says Claire Clark, a native of England who now works as head pastry chef of The French Laundry in Yountville, Calif. Clark’s book, “Indulge: 100 Perfect Desserts,” is scheduled to debut next month and includes both her native country’s homey dishes, like a sticky toffee pudding and charlottes, which Clark says her U.S. guests may feel at home with.
“I think it’s fun to serve anything that can reconnect [guests] with their childhood,” Clark says.
But at her high-end restaurant where a nine-course tasting menu runs $240 a person, Clark embellishes classics with extra indulgences.
“It is challenging to present a dessert in a way that is modern and creative, yet classic,” she says.
She often teams the familiar and unfamiliar on a single plate.
“The apple-cinnamon charlotte might be a very small component in a sorbet dessert,” Clark says. “I may go with an apple sorbet, and I would probably serve it with a sauce or foam made with a raisin base.”
Clark’s desserts change frequently depending on the availability of produce from farmers.
“I think it is so nice for the customer to be presented with something that they feel comforted by,” she says, noting that an average guest takes four hours to consume The French Laundry’s meals.
Brooke Mosley, pastry chef of Whist restaurant at hotel Viceroy in Santa Monica, Calif., also updates homey classics, such as an upside-down cake.
“It’s a take on pineapple upside-down cake,” she says. Like the classic dish, it has a “gooey” texture, but this $11 rendition is baked individually and comes with toasted-almond ice cream, almond brittle and red plum-cherry sauce.
That dish is the most obvious comfort dessert on Whist’s dessert menu, Mosley says, but the most popular is “just chocolate.” This aptly named dish was conceived because Mosley says her guests often requested “just chocolate.”
So she accompanies a well-recognized flourless chocolate cake baked in a brioche mold with chocolate ice cream, chocolate sauce and a chocolate candy. The dessert is $11.
“People really like the chocolate tasting,” $9, at Tristan restaurant in Charleston, S.C., as well, says pastry chef Nicole Anhalt. “It’s classy, but people recognize it and it’s fun.”
For this sampling, Anhalt teams a house-made milk chocolate s’more with a fudge ice that is meant to pull diners’ memories back to the favored frozen ice pop often delivered via a bell-ringing truck.
“I wanted to recreate blowing bubbles in your chocolate milk with the ‘chocolate milk air,’” Anhalt adds. “So it’s basically whole milk with chocolate sauce and soy protein powder.”
Anhalt whips the milk mixture with a hand blender until frothy. She says the powder keeps the bubbles intact for three to four minutes—enough time to transport the dish from the pastry kitchen to a table.
Finally this tasting dessert features a miniature molten Black Forest cake, a chocolate cake with cherry chutney, her most elegant dessert.
“You have to have one filet mignon,” Anhalt says, and it’s best if that one fancy dessert is also “something that people recognize.” The Black Forest cake can also be ordered on its own for $8.
But for Anhalt personally, it’s carrot cake that takes her back home.
“I grew up in a little town in North Carolina called Lexington,” she says. “Every time there was a function someone would bring carrot cake. It always had pineapple and walnuts.”
“I like to deconstruct things,” she adds, so she serves a carrot cake in the form of an ice cream sandwich for $7 with a shot glass of pineapple frappe on the side.
“Ice cream sandwiches are really nostalgic,” Anhalt says. “It kind of makes you feel like a kid, except you’re not having chocolate and vanilla. You’re having carrot cake and cream cheese sorbet.”
For the sorbet, she churns cream cheese with lemon juice, corn syrup and glucose, resulting in an extra-smooth, eggless ice cream, she says. The frozen mixture also remains soft but holds its shape, and “it doesn’t ooze when cut,” she says.
Warm donuts and cream cheese dipping sauce top the sales charts for the new “Flavor Road” limited-time offering rolled out by O’Charley’s, the 240-unit chain based in Nashville, Tenn. In the dining room servers shake the warm, ping-pong-ball size donuts in a white paper bag that contains cinnamon and sugar. The dessert is priced at $4.99 and is served ten to a portion on a platter.
“You are always looking for something that sets you apart,” says Stephen Bulgarelli, vice president of culinary development for O’Charley’s, and the dining room presentation of this new and easily shareable dessert has grabbed attention. “People are appreciating tableside service.”
Also gaining ground are sampling-size sweets, such as the Mini Dessert Shots that recently debuted on the menu at participating T.G.I. Friday’s restaurants. The chain, based in Carrollton, Texas, operates, franchises and licenses 888 restaurants. The shots that carry Friday’s bar theme to the dessert section of the menu come in familiar flavors, such as Rocky Road, Chocolate Raspberry, Peanut Butter Cup, Chocolate Chip Mint and Orange Cream.
Two of the small sweets may be selected to conclude the chain’s $12.99, three-course menu or they may be purchased individually for $1.99 each or five for $7.
Sweets “tend to shut down” the appetite, Sax wrote in his exhaustive tome. “Thus in much of the world, dessert assumed its place at the end of the meal, when we’re not still actually hungry but may want ‘a little something’ to cap things off.”
