- my iParenting
- quick clicks
- recipes today articles
- recipes today q&a
- message boards
- research baby names
- prepare a birth plan
- content channels
- ip channel rss feeds
- read birth stories
- read parenting stories
- recommended books
- e-newsletters
- safety recalls
- ip diaries
- ip store
- mom of the month
- dad of the month
- editor's letter
- letters to the editor
 |
- e-newsletters
- Sign up to receive our free weekly e-newsletters
- award-winning products
The iParenting Media Awards program helps parents find the best products for their families.
A Sweet Quartet
Sugar, Almonds, Eggs and Butter: A Baker's Tour Including 33 Recipes
By Fran Gage
Desserts are sweet – sometimes just a hint, sometimes a punch – but sweetness is a defining quality, especially in the Western world. Our fondness for sweet food seems to be part of our genetic makeup, just as our attraction to music distinguishes us from other animals. Early people relied on fruit to bring this special taste to their diets. Tens of millennia ago, early Homo sapiens raided wild bee hives, braving stings from the inhabitants for the pleasure of eating the insects' food. Later, people chewed fibrous sugarcane because it tasted good. Eventually, the canes were crushed to extract their sweet juice, and the first primitive sugar processing began. Cane sugar became a highly prized commodity and a staple of world trade. It reigned supreme until the 18th century; then a chemist extracted sucrose from beets, which could be grown in a wider range of climates. Today, much of our food contains sweeteners, most often corn syrup, so familiar a taste it may be hardly perceptible to us. Fortunately, fine desserts still depend on sugar to impart the taste that most of us crave.
Although other nuts are liberally sprinkled into desserts and pastries, almonds hold an exalted place in the desserts of the great cuisines, especially French, Viennese and Italian. Their versatility is vast. Finely ground, they add texture as well as flavor to meringues, macaroons, tart dough and financiers. Left whole, then cooked with sugar, they harden into a confection, to be broken into bits and swirled into ice cream or butter cream or mixed with chocolate to make candies. If this cooked mass is ground between heavy rollers, the result is almond paste. With the addition of sugar syrup, almond paste becomes more pliable and can be rolled into sheets to drape over cakes or hand-shaped into confections. 
The preparation of the almonds themselves is almost as diverse as the desserts they grace.
