10. ATTRACTIVENESS OF DESSERTS.--Attractiveness, as has been mentioned,
is essential in a dessert if it is to appeal to an appetite that may be
nearly satisfied by the time the dessert course is reached. To render
dessert attractive, it should be carefully made and artistically
garnished and served. It may be made to appeal through a sense of
beautiful proportion, an attractive color combination, or an attractive
or artistic preparation. Because sweets are liked by most persons, it is
seldom difficult to prepare attractive desserts. Indeed, the housewife
who fails in this respect may be said to be unsuccessful in the easiest
part of cookery.
11. ECONOMICAL USE OF INGREDIENTS.--The ingredients required for dessert
making are usually expensive ones, although there are some marked
exceptions to this rule. In view of this fact, the housewife should
strive to use economically the various ingredients she purchases. For
instance, the first strawberries, which, because of their scarcity, are
much more expensive than the later ones, may be made to go much further
if they are used in shortcake than if they are served as plain fruit. In
making a fruit gelatine, apples and bananas, while they may not be so
attractive as canned pineapple and maraschino cherries, are much cheaper
and may be used for a considerable portion of the fruit that is put into
the gelatine. Then, too, it is well to remember that cream goes much
further with desserts when it is whipped than when it is served plain.
12. APPLYING COOKERY RULES TO DESSERTS.--If the best results in dessert
making are to be obtained, the rules that govern the cooking of various
ingredients in other dishes should be observed. For instance, eggs
should not be cooked at a higher temperature in making desserts than
when they are being poached. Then, again, starchy materials that are
used to thicken desserts or that form a basis for these dishes must be
thoroughly cooked in order to be agreeable and digestible. Therefore, to
put both starchy materials and eggs into a dessert at the same time and
give them the same amount of cooking at the same temperature, is, as the
woman who understands cookery knows, not only a very poor plan, but a
possible means of ruining good material. Another waste of good material
results when a custard is so prepared that it is half water or when a
rice or a bread pudding floats in liquid that was never intended to be
served with it. Again, nothing is less tasty than a corn-starch pudding
or a blanc mange in which the starch has not been thoroughly cooked or a
tapioca pudding in which the centers of the tapioca are hard and
uncooked. Such mistakes as these, however, can be avoided if the
housewife will apply to desserts the principles she has learned in other
parts of cookery, for knowledge coupled with care in preparation is the
keynote of successful dessert making.
The cookery methods usually applied in the preparation of desserts are
boiling, steaming, dry steaming, and baking. As these methods are
explained in _Essentials of Cookery_, Part 1, and are used constantly in
the preparation of the majority of dishes served in a meal, they should
by this time be so well understood that practically no difficulty will
be experienced in applying them to desserts.
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