Savory and Sweet Dishes
Here’s a question. In classic French cooking (and much Western cooking) savory and sweet dishes mirror one another. That is, you can have sweet or savory souffles and pastries of various kinds. You have sauces and custards based on similar and often identical techniques. You have gelatin showing up as aspics and sweet jellies and bavarian creams, and so on.
I don’t think this happens in other major culinary traditions such as Indian, Chinese, Persian, etc. Or am I wrong? Any thoughts greatly appreciated.
Interesting observation Rachel. If i can generalize your observation, we can probably say anytime you have a dish that involves a stuffing – a savory as well as a sweet version is there. This is mostly true in India. I have seen the same with Chinese Dim Sum dumplings. However, there are plenty of sweet and savory dishes in India that have no corresponding savory/sweet versions. I have a question though, i am sure there are desserts which don’t have fillings? For instance, Priya Raju, my wife pointed that you have biscuits/cookies which have both a savory and sweet version but don’t have fillings typically.
One exception I thought of is probably not an exception at all. I was thinking of North African cuisines, specifically Algerian. Going through a list of dishes in my head and parsing out the various influences in cooking techniques, well I ended up with a bit of a headache.
In Algerian cuisine pastries are both sweet and savory (there are a few more examples). On the other hand they don’t make the same distinctions between sweet and savory that the French do. Sugar is still a spice in the Algerian kitchen, they combine sweet and savory in a single dish or meal and “traditional” sweets are predominately Islamic influenced.
However, if we’re talking about cooking techniques for sweet and savory that mirror each other throughout a cuisine, then I can’t think of another major culinary tradition that does that.
Rajagopal and Ji-YOung,
Thanks for the helpful and thought-provoking comments. Some reactions.
1. Where sugar was or is used as a spice, then obviously there is not the sharp distinction between sweet and savory that there is in French cooking.
2. Pastries, which I understand as fat-flour mixtures can always presumably be salted or sweetened. I think of filo dough. But in India? China?
3. Stuffed things. Probably yes. Dim sum is a great example. In Mexico you could include tamales. India?
4. Some French techniques I think of.
Use of meat gelatin as a major component of aspics and of sweet dishes.
Use of whipped egg whites to raise sweet and savory souffles
Use of egg–butter/cream emulsions
Pate a choux, short crust, etc.
Looking through this may be it’s not obvious where I am replying to each of you. But I am.
“Sweet” and “Savory” as separate items is relatively modern even in Western cookery. A 16th century English chicken pie would likely have sugar in it and be served with a sweet custard sauce. For a modern diner it doesn’t fit into either a sweet or savory category neatly.
Where a bifurcation occurs like this it isn’t unexpected that you will get some elements in the different strands of development that reflect a common origin. In your list in point 4., only souffle doesn’t fit pattern of sweet or savory dishes reflecting a common origin, possibly as it is relatively modern in origin
Another example I thought of for French techniques: sweet or savory puddings. On second thought that’s related to the custards you mention. But I’m thinking beyond sauces and including milk (or cream) and eggs used as a binding agent for solid ingredients in casserole type puddings like bread pudding. Cream and eggs are also used to bind potato gratins.
Pain perdu (French toast) is also made into sweet or savory dishes. but maybe this is stretching the idea of “technique” a bit.
Rachel: As Rajagopal wrote anytime you have a dish that involves a stuffing – a savory as well as a sweet version is mostly true in Indian cuisine. In south Indian cuisine steamed cooked rice balls filled coconut filling are made both savory and sweet. A festival dish – koova varattiyathu – is also prepared in two different ways – sweet and savory – with arrowroot flour. When cooked in butter with spices it yields the savory version; cooked with milk sugar and cardamom it becomes the sweet counterpart.
http://www.peppertrail.com/php/displayContent.php3?link_id=52&link_id_tmp=28&parent_link=3
Rachel,
We have a few dishes similar to Dimsum in India as Ammini describes above – called Kuzhi Paniyaram. We also have something called Kozhakattai (known as Pite in Bengal) which are a lot similar to Dimsum in the way it is made. It is made in sweet and savory versions. There is yet another dish called Appam which is made of rice flour and either sweet or savory fillings and is deep fried.
As for filo dough, we make the covering out of a gram flour based batter, stuff the filling and deep fry it = samosas are made that way and we also make a sweet version of it called Somasi.
Thanks you all so much for a very interesting discussion. Adam, I’m in complete agreement about the late separation of sweet and sour in French and English cooking. I think one of the things that complicates matters is that a lot of new techniques come along at roughly the same time. Correct me if I am wrong but the use of whipped egg whites, whipped cream, roux-type sauces etc all appear to date from about then. So one might say they discovered or exploited interesting techniques in every way they could. Oh, and I wasn’t quite sure I understood why you felt soufflés were the odd dish out. Could you explain?
And Ji-Young I’ll have to think about egg and milk bound bread pudding (which can be savory if cheese is used) and gratins. I have the feeling these go back beyond the 17th century sweet-savory divide that Adam was talking about.
Another thing I am finding hard to do is to keep techniques straight. There are the most basic–whipping egg whites, or cream, or making a gelatin. But of course you get them combined in so many ways. A bavarian cream has all three of these techniques.
Ammini, as you know I’m always thrilled to have south Indian input and have carefully noted your examples. I specially love the arrowroot preparations and want to try them. Arrowroot produces such lovely results.
Rajagopal, your examples, like Ammini’s make me realize
just how little I know about the multitudinous products of kitchens across the Indian subcontinent. I think the samosas I’ve had in the UK or the US have used wheat flour for example. And I’ve certainly never tried a sweet samosa.
I shall need to think about this for a while. I’m not sure that a single clear conclusion is emerging, at least not yet.
I think that it would be fair to say that rather then specific techniques being discovered at this point they were refined and/or codified. It’s pretty rare that something entirely new is developed.
Souffle builds upon some earlier techniques but the modern form seems to have been developed in savory and sweet forms from its point of origin in the late 18th century. The other items that were discussed have earlier origins prior to the sweet/savory split.
Agree that it’s very hard to develop something completely new. Cross reference to Oaxaca cheese.
I didn’t mention it, but what about roux-based sauces. I think those are more or less coincident with the split.
To put a conventional date on in French roux based sauces were developed in the 17th century, hugely popular in the 18th, criticized in the 19th and shunned in the 20th..
The sweet/savory split is usually dated around the mid-17th century (and both are attributed to Varenne). In reality the split occured in different places at different times and was spread over a decades and centuries in some cases.