How To End A Meal

Dessert may bring a meal to a close, but it can add to what has come before just perfectly

- Tamar Adler

WHAT WE EAT at the end of a meal marks its passage. If we have eaten well, our hearts and bellies full, the occasion will be bittersweet. Conversation will have slowed, the night’s slope tilted.

What seemed like it would last forever now seems certain to be nearly done.

I am always grateful for a little more time at the table; the meal must pass somehow, and I am better consoled with one more taste than with the rather less voluptuary sound of a gong.

If a meal cannot go on forever I ask only that its passage be not too jarring. I ask dessert to leave room for the flavours and smells before it, to let them linger faint, and not erased, in its margins. I prefer not to clear my mental slate. I ask dessert to look kindly on my current condition: what tastes have been on my tongue, how much I have eaten, and of what.

If you want to bake dessert, choose an easy one. Easy baking exists, and if you are not trying to pummel a meal’s savour out of memory with sugar and cream, but to usher it to a graceful close, the simplest cakes and cookies are often the best.