Explainer / Why are the best desserts not sweet – according to the Hong Kong palate? Ancient Indians, Greeks and Romans craved sugar, but China used fruit ingredients to balance meals instead

Jun 3 , 2022

Desserts that go easy on the sugar. Photo: Kenny Wong

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The best compliment someone can give a dessert is that it isn’t sweet.

To many, this may sound like an oxymoron – but for a true pastry fiend, it’s a fact.

“When I was making desserts for the buffet line at Blue Bar, we continually got feedback that the desserts were too sweet,” says pastry chef Ringo Chan of Four Seasons Hong Kong. When we asked if he knew why, Chan simply said, “Because sugar was not part of Hongkongers’ diet when they were growing up.”

Let’s take a quick look at how sugar, the food that nobody needs but everyone craves, took over the world.

Sugar is native to and was first cultivated in New Guinea. By 6,000BC, sugar cane made its way by ship to the Philippines and India. Sugar was first refined in India, and the first description of a sugar mill can be found in an Indian text dating back to AD100.

When it comes to cakes, presentation is all part of the decadence. Photo: Vive Cake Boutique

The ancient Greeks and Romans learned about sugar from their visits to India. By AD600 knowledge of sugar was shared at Jundi Shapur, a university in Iran where the world’s scholars west of China congregated. Most importantly, it was through this institution that the methods for processing sugar cane into crystallised sugar were developed. The Arabs became masters of growing, refining and cooking with sugar, and as Ottoman armies moved into Egypt, Persia, India and the Mediterranean, they brought their knowledge of sugar with them.

During the Crusades, Europeans conquered Jerusalem and learned about sugar production, which was a profitable business in the city at the time. When the soldiers returned home, they brought sugar with them, sparking widespread demand across Europe. From here, sugar spread through the colonies along with the growth of slavery.

The intense labour required to grow and produce sugar in tropical climes made the industry synonymous with the slave trade. But due to the abolitionist movement, along with the invention of sugar derived from sugar beet production and the rise of the industrial age in the US, sugar cane production declined.