According to Tsuji, fruit is the “dessert” of the Japanese meal. Traditionally, sweets are served after a formal meal as an accompaniment to matcha tea and designed ‘to complement the flavour of the tea itself’.

 

This didn’t bode well for me, given that from a young age I’ve insisted on the existence of the ‘dessert stomach’ — a mutually exclusive domain to the ‘main meal stomach’ and especially the ‘green vegetables stomach’.

Sure enough, Tsuji’s Sweets and Confections section is filled with such delights as three types of sweet red-bean paste, a sweet potato puree, and mochi. All flavours that fit in the postdoctoral level of the acquired-taste syllabus, at least for anyone who’s grown up with the kind of desserts that are nothing more than cunning ways to ingest large amounts of fat and sugar as quickly as possible.

So instead, with the excuse of the last few days of Chinese New Year, I decided to make that popular dimsum dessert: mango pudding.

This being my mother’s signature dessert — we bring two giant bowls of the stuff to parties and never bring back left-overs — I’ll be a good daughter and not reveal the recipe to the entire blogsphere. However, a google search for mango pudding will turn up a few ideas. Hint: substitute fresh cream (double, single, your choice) for the evaporated milk that’s quoted in most online recipes. Come on, people, it’s not 1940s wartime, loosen the purse-strings and belt-buckles.

After all, if you want a healthy dessert, there’s always fruit.