AW: I’ve created this dessert to build particular interest in different parts of China and the stories I want to tell, as opposed to just coming up with a standard traditional dessert dish.
It’s a celebration of the overall idea of Chinese desserts, which is a difficult topic to tackle. To me, traditional Chinese desserts are particularly unsuitable for western diners. Desserts aren’t traditionally eaten at the end of a meal in China; instead, they are enjoyed as part of the main meal or as a communal experience outside of formal meal times. These dishes are usually soups and broths and there isn’t that resolute sweetness that you get with European desserts. And if you don’t use butter or sugar in a European dessert, then it becomes a very different thing.
MD: But sugar did arrive in China with quite the fanfare. In the eleventh and twelfth century, the night markets in the city of Kaifeng were full of varieties of candies, cakes, fruit preserves, flavoured powdered sugars, brown sugars, white sugars and sugar syrups. Martin de Rada and Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, two Augustine friars visiting Fujian in 1575, found that refined sugar was widely used to make edible sculptures, similar to those you saw in European courts around the same time. Refined sugar was still expensive enough that it was limited to the tables of elites and given as extravagant gifts. For everyone else, it was a seasoning. You have recipes from the 1700s for dumplings filled with sugar and goose fat, and biscuits made with walnuts and melon seeds coated with sugar.
AW: This idea of sugar as a seasoning is still reflected in the way that bird’s nest is typically cooked in China: in a pumpkin broth and seasoned with a little bit of rock sugar. It’s a dish that straddles the sweet-savoury divide, although it falls a little more on the sweet side. So with this dessert dish, I’ve kept things within the realm of desserts in a format I hope people will try. It’s a vegetarian product the way that milk or cream is, and because it is so important to Chinese gastronomy I wanted diners in the UK to have a chance to experience it.
MD: Bringing the granita together with the coconut ice cream and the mulberries is a celebration of places such as Hainan in the southern coastal region of China. Hainan is very much a beach resort (similar to places in Thailand) and is a place to bury your toes in the sand. People don’t necessarily equate tropical climates and tastes with a place like China, but in truth China is vast and straddles many different climate zones. It isn’t just a place full of skyscrapers and hutongs.