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"FacebookPinterest\n\ni am no longer 8 years old, but I feel that way whenever I order dessert. My mother hovers over me, in spirit at least, letting me know what I cannot have, just as she always did.\n\n At the rural Pennsylvania dairy where we would stop on the ride home from my grandmother's house, I'd stare in wonder at the menu board over the freezer case of ice cream. Up there was a sundae so irresistibly grandiose that I would dream of it between trips.\n\n\"I want that,\" I'd say. \"The Pig's Dinner.\"\n\n\"No, you will not have the Pig's Dinner,\" my mother invariably replied, and though we were a Jewish family, religious restrictions were not the problem. (Anyway, pastry chefs had yet to come up with the entertaining idea of adding bacon to ice cream.) \"You may have a chocolate sundae.\"\n\nHardly abusive, you might think, and in my more rational moments I must agree, but I have to think my obsession with desserts, barely diminished from childhood, results from excessive denial in those early days: \"Three cookies is enough.\"\u2026 \"You don't need whipped cream on everything.\"\u2026 I might not have endured those years of deprivation had I not been encouraged to pour heavy cream on my sugared cereal, then considered nutritionally desirable.\n\nAll of us are incessantly being told that food should be local, but desserts are adolescent. They are a way of life\u2014the life you led before you made rational (and often boring) decisions about what was best for you to eat. The world of sweetness is a fantasyland where the basic desires of childhood are satisfied, provided one is mentally strong enough to ignore lingering parental admonitions and physically sound enough to laugh at contemporary medical cautions.\n\nDiners who live for the pleasure of main courses might fret over the fat content of their cream sauces, but they face far fewer crises than dessert eaters (unless they're morally conflicted by foie gras). Desserts are exquisitely torturous to those of us who know our health is better served if we do without them, and we envy those who have the constitutions (and blood workups) that enable them to indulge without guilt.\n\nTo adults, desserts are the ultimate forbidden fruit, unless they actually eat fruit, in which case desserts are neither forbidden nor much fun. (Fruit belongs in salads, the banana and the Maraschino cherry notwithstanding.)  Now you know why I made my way to Sherman Dairy Bar, in South Haven, Michigan, just a few miles from Lake Michigan, on a chilly, snow-is-on-the-way day this past March. It was opening weekend\u2014premature, I'd say\u2014of the summer season, and what I had sought for more than fifty years awaited me: a Pig's Dinner, served in a genuine miniature wooden trough. Not only is the ice cream made on the premises, so too is the trough. \"Building them gives us something to do in the winter,\" the company president, Bob Eisenman, told me.\n\nSundaes lend themselves to fanciful and fabulous names\u2014Pig's Dinner, Kitchen Sink, Gut Buster, Belly Buster, Goliath, Volcano, Suicide Sundae, Atomic Sundae, and even a few well-respected variations on the porcine theme, Pig Out and Pig's Delight. By my reckoning, there is no such thing as a badly named sundae. Even the tough decisions\u2014hot fudge or cold chocolate, marshmallow topping or whipped cream?\u2014provide enormous entertainment, delaying the most certain gratification on earth. (You didn't think it was sex, did you?)\n\nAs I sat warming up with a mug of complimentary coffee\u2014the ceramic mugs are on hooks, the coffeepot is constantly refilled\u2014I realized that Sherman's has everything I want in an ice cream parlor, including a blue plastic cow on the roof. That many of the flavors are local is demonstrably clear: There is one named Blue Moon that was an iridescent glow on the tongue of a 3-year-old giggling wildly as he ate a dish of it in an adjoining booth.\n\nI asked for my Pig's Dinner prepared traditionally, without culinary imagination. The standard assemblage includes four scoops of ice cream, one each of vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and butter pecan. While at first that seemed hardly enough, each scoop by my reckoning was about a half pint. The toppings were artfully applied by Dawn, the manager: crushed pineapple on the strawberry, chocolate syrup on the vanilla, marshmallow sauce on the chocolate, gooey butterscotch on the butter pecan. (Such perfection comes with a half century in the sundae business.)\n\nSome customers select their own flavors and toppings, and they are welcome to do so, although the possibilities are overly abundant. Dawn told me the indecisive ones do the \"flavor dance\" for as long as twenty minutes, hopping back and forth in front of the freezer case, trying to improve on what should be left as is.\n\nThere's more to a Pig's Dinner, of course: banana slices buried deep in the trough. Cumulus clouds of whipped cream, one of the great foodstuffs, up there with buttercream and pastry cream as a building block of a bad body. Maraschino cherries, correctly served on the stem.\n\nA button reading i made a pig of myself at sherman dairy is the prize, in theory awarded only to those who can finish the entire sundae by themselves. This was clearly not going to be me. In fact, a smirking fellow in another booth watched me struggle and said too loudly, \"The snow is liable to come before he finishes.\" I did not take offense. Even the testiest of men do not get into fistfights in ice cream shops.\n\nDespite my disappointing performance, Eisenman rewarded me with a button. He realizes that everybody ends up sharing, and he is a practical businessman, much loved in the community for wisdom such as this: \"I don't sit there and say, \u2018Oh, you had help; you don't get a button.' \"\n\nIt's not easy to describe how satisfied I felt after visiting Sherman's. It made me realize that the shrewd adage \"Be careful what you wish for\" doesn't apply where desserts are concerned. There's not much sense in pursuing wealth or women, but desserts are always worth the chase.\n\n\n\nbefore sauternes and foie gras, there was Pepsi and Hydrox.\n\nThe first is a pairing of the gods, the second of Cub Scout meetings. Some kids join to learn how to tie square knots; for me, scouting offered my first memorable food-and-beverage matchup.\n\nPepsi-Cola seemed to have more high notes than Coke, while the Hydrox cookie soared above the less complex Oreo. (Hydrox cookies no longer exist, having been vanquished by Oreos after decades of epic commercial combat.)  I never forgot that lesson, because what kids learn about desserts stays with them all their lives. Show me a man who believes his favorite desserts are those he has eaten as an adult and I'll show you a man who had an unhappy childhood.\n\nSavory foods are straightforward: protein, carbohydrate, fat. Desserts are infinitely more complex, incorporating most of what is known about shape, form, and structure. To those add texture, contrast, and technique. The only commonality is that to some extent, every one must be sweet.\n\nYet if they are of little or no use nutritionally, they are invaluable psychologically. They soothe us when we are depressed, elevate us when we are festive, console us in times of despair. They impart insightful messages, happy birthday being the one of such importance that it is clearly written in icing, not implied. Nothing completes a celebration more than cake, with or without candles, but always with icing.\n\nSomebody like me, a man of as much experience as anyone in the random and unrestrained consumption of desserts, has wisdom worth passing on.\n\nPies are for family gatherings, bod chocolates for girls you want to know better, bars of Lindt for packing in your luggage on long trips away from home. Ice cream cones (with sprinkles) are for roadside stops, ice pops for summer afternoons in bathing suits. Aunts should always show up with bags of homemade chocolate-chip cookies, although that doesn't preclude other relatives from baking for you. Sundaes are for grandchildren and cotton candy for carnivals. Even molded Jell-O has its place, because your mother added that canned fruit to demonstrate her love. Funnel cakes are the greatest of all ethnic foods, although I have no quarrel with those who prefer churros. Nothing satisfies more in the damp gloom of a weary day than a bonbon, provided you don't get the piece with the yucky raspberry-cream center.\n\nCustards should be eaten dreamily while you are alone and pumpkin pie earnestly to please the family members whose feelings would be hurt if you didn't sample everything on the Thanksgiving table. Only cheesecake is served at a more unfortunate time\u2014it's invariably picked at in steak houses by bond traders who have each consumed a twenty-ounce T-bone and three or four heavily buttered rolls. Still, I will forever remain captivated by cheesecake, because one of the supreme pleasures of my childhood was driving over the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, handing the toll taker the requisite nickel from the back window of our Oldsmobile, then stopping for a cool slice at the Country Club Diner. Cheesecake seemed so much creamier in those days, a bridge between a milk shake and ice cream.\n\nPie can teach you about the kind of man you are. The banana-cream pie, modest in height, topped with whipped cream as lovely as a soft-breaking wave, the discs of banana softened to a baby-friendly consistency, is markedly unlike the majestic lemon-meringue pie, where the tartness of the fruit aggressively counters the billowy, Taj Mahal\u2013like meringue. Few sights are more welcoming or irresistible than a lemon-meringue pie rotating in the glass case at a diner, just inside the front door.\n\nI would like to think of myself as a lemon-meringue kind of guy, being as it's more adult, but I fear I am a devotee of banana cream. There's another reason that both are champions of the pie world: Their fruit is always fresh and never seems cooked. Classic fruit pies\u2014strawberry-rhubarb, peach, whatever\u2014are drearily similar in numerous ways to supermarket meat pot pies, which I do not admire.\n\nI have a few other dislikes, but not many. I don't want salt sprinkled on my desserts, even high-minded pink sea salt from some Hawaiian coast. I don't enjoy marshmallows snipped off tableside; it's way too French. Of course, marshmallows roasted over a campfire are exquisite, the only dessert that should be served searing hot. (That's the second great lesson I learned in the Cub Scouts.) I particularly dislike the custom of plopping cold ice cream in the center of hot souffl\u00E9s, a perverse practice that ruins two desserts at once. I never cared much for Chuckles as a kid, and I don't go for gel\u00E9es now. That's never going to change.\n\nTo most people, desserts are best eaten immediately after meals, while candy is a sweet intended to fulfill random desires. I don't think that way. To me they both serve the same purpose, and I will eat either at any time. Most people get a growl in their stomachs when they're hungry, something a burger will quell. Not me. I get a growl in my mind, a random lust for something sweet. When that comes upon me, it must be pacified by whatever is on hand.  It's not that I don't want a little something with sugar after lunch or dinner. I do, but just a small bite, which is why I consider myself a connoisseur of the petits fours plate, the array of miniature cookies, candies, and pastries that arrives at the conclusion of meals in fine restaurants. They are a magical m\u00E9lange, and they are prepared by underpaid pastry assistants with frayed fingertips who work unendurably long hours in service to the pampered restaurant clients of the world. The practice is reminiscent of Third World sweatshops, and I shamefully admit that it bothers me not a bit.\n\nTo be honest, I'm not that levelheaded in the presence of petits fours. If you're eating with me, I wouldn't advise turning your head when they're set down. Something in my makeup trumps rationality when desserts arrive. I will devour everything, regardless of whether I want it or not.\n\n\n\nWhen I was a child and my family drove up to New York City from Philadelphia, my father always brought me to Yonah Schimmel's, a shop on the Lower East Side specializing in knishes, the ultimate nineteenth-century Eastern European snack food. Knishes are most commonly filled with potatoes, but there are also sweet knishes, and that's what my father ordered, because we were invariably coming from a lunch of pastrami and cream soda at Katz's Delicatessen down the street.\n\nYonah Schimmel Knish Bakery essentially jump-started my career as a restaurant critic. I never liked the knishes there, and when I'd ask my father why we always came here, he'd just smile and continue eating. I went back recently to see if I would react differently, and I admit it was wonderful to be in the store. It hadn't changed.\n\nThe tables are scattered about randomly, as though they were set down in 1910, when the restaurant first opened, and not straightened since. The linoleum floor looks original, and the walls are crammed with an assortment of badly arranged press clippings and photos. It's as though a deranged serial killer had been hired as the decorator.\n\nI don't want to be unfair, because the knishes at Yonah Schimmel's are warm and fresh, which counts for a lot, and they're famous, which means I could be wrong about not liking them. I had the cherry-cheese, which was cloying and reminded me of a throat lozenge. It was then that I realized that my father\u2014born in 1915 and raised on the Lower East Side\u2014was returning to Yonah Schimmel's because the knish was his madeleine.\n\nThe concept of the madeleine, to say nothing of the rebirth of the petite shell-shaped pastry itself, was brought about by Marcel Proust, a sickly writer who was inordinately fond of his mother and whose tribute to her madeleine is the Gettysburg Address of food writing. In part, his manifesto reads, \"One day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take.\u2026 She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called \u2018petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell.\u2026 A shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.\"\n\nMarcel was actually not much of a food writer, since he only talked about himself and not the madeleine, giving us no idea of how it tasted. Likely it resembled a pound cake in flavor, inasmuch as Proust's mother was Jewish, and to a Jew, a nice slice of pound cake evokes plenty\u2014to me, late-afternoon noshes in neighborhood coffee shops.\n\nThese days, it seems, many men are seeking their madeleine, the holy grail of sweets, the dessert that most comforted them when they were children. (I'm not positive the quest is quite the same for women, who seem to be similarly reassured by Jane Austen novels.) The Pig's Dinner was not my madeleine\u2014a man's madeleine by definition cannot be what he has never before eaten. For me, the possibilities are countless.\n\nI loved saltwater taffy, particularly James' \"Cut-to-fit-the-Mouth,\" every plump piece double-wrapped in paper with a polka-dot twist at each end, and each one carefully labeled, which was vitally important so you could avoid the weird ones. So many colors. So many choices\u2014seventeen, to be exact. Since I always had to share with my sister, I always gave the bad ones, like molasses mint, to her.\n\nMaybe the best thing about saltwater taffy was that labeling. Kids back then weren't like the kids of today. We had no choices in life, certainly none we could make about food, and saltwater taffy allowed us a sliver of self-determination, the right to eat whatever flavors we wanted in the order we wanted to eat them. (LifeSavers had five varieties, of course, but you had to eat each piece as it popped up. With a run of bad luck, you could be stuck with pineapple a lot.)\n\nMy mother unconditionally approved of saltwater taffy because it was wrapped twice, which she was convinced made it a sanitary and healthful product, although we kids weren't so sure. Sooner or later, all of us asked ourselves if there really was salt in saltwater taffy, and if there was, would it make us sick? I haven't preserved much from my childhood, but I still have one of the original barrel-shaped papier-m\u00E2ch\u00E9 containers from James' that came filled with taffy and were designed to be used as banks. It has not appreciated in value as I had hoped\u2014I recently saw one offered on eBay for $2.99\u2014and I suspect it has minimum intrinsic value because of a design flaw. A kid had to be pretty stupid to keep his life savings stashed away in papier-m\u00E2ch\u00E9.\n\nI have always loved nonpareils, discs of dark chocolate covered with white sugary dots, perhaps because of another deep-seated belief: There is chocolate and there is vanilla, and all flavors after those are basically ornamentation. They were my favorite corner-store candies, back then selling for a nickel a box.\n\nI consider nuts a fundamental building block of desserts and candy, even if they are more commonly eaten in salted form. Among the most important cartoon characters of my life, equal to Mickey Mouse, was Mr. Peanut, who wore a top hat, spats, and white gloves and beautifully represented the Planters company. (I never understood why Disney never went into the candy business, because the company would easily have achieved world domination.)\n\nIn the field of bod, presentation-style candy, I love none more than See's, which comes from California. The pieces are large and the fillings plenty fancy enough for me. Intellectually, I admire those chocolates that cost $75 a pound, La Maison du Chocolat and the like\u2014and who could not?\u2014but I feel about them as I do about wines like Roman\u00E9e-Conti. It is far too simple and shows an absence of discrimination to admire only that which costs more than anything else.\n\nSee's California Brittle, to this day my favorite piece of candy, has a surfeit of everything irresistible\u2014not just the requisite genuine chocolate coating (milk chocolate most of the year but a choice of milk or dark during the Christmas season) but also nuttiness, sweetness, and crunchiness, all adding up to an assurance of a stunningly successful candy experience. Brittle\u2014basically almonds transformed into a meltingly crisp assemblage through the addition of sugar, butter, and cream\u2014is to me the ultimate filling, and while I generally prefer cashews to any other nuts, cashew brittle is somehow not the equal of almond brittle. I think we're talking umami, the elusive fifth taste, when almond brittle is discussed.\n\nMilk shakes are better than ice cream sodas, although I don't for the life of me understand why anybody likes malt in theirs. (A moment here to pay our respects to Stephen J. Poplawski of the Stevens Electric Company, who invented the blender in 1922. The purpose was to make malted milk shakes, and it's possible the reason he isn't remembered is all that superfluous malt he added to his drinks.)\n\nIt's clear, I hope, that sprinkles should be chocolate, not multicolored. The love of multicolored sprinkles is one of the few childhood dessert infatuations that should be outgrown. The only fundamental alteration in my dessert habits today is that I now prefer Coke to Pepsi, but I have to admit I was shaken when that occurred. I felt that part of my childhood was lost, in the same way I knew that I had grown up in an undesirable way the day I no longer liked to read comic books.\n\n\n\n I suppose I could be considered an intractable fellow, cranky much of the time, particularly when I don't get my afternoon bowl of chocolate-chip ice cream. I have much to say about desserts that I realize not everybody will want to hear. We all believe we know best where desserts are concerned.\n\nThe Carvel Brown Bonnet, one of America's best ice cream options, should always be ordered in a cup. You probably think otherwise. A conventional Brown Bonnet is a scoop of ice cream in a cone that is turned over and dunked in liquid chocolate. Magically, the ice cream remains in place during the dunking\u2014a technique outwardly similar to bobbing for apples, an embarrassing and unrewarding ercise that at best results in an apple, not much of a reward.\n\nOnce the cone is turned upright, the chocolate quickly hardens, creating a thin, pleasingly crunchy shell. Order your Brown Bonnet in a cup and the warm chocolate is poured over the ice cream, the excess puddling in the bottom. That results in approximately twice the chocolate at no extra cost. To me this is reminiscent of the trinket hidden in the box of Cracker Jack, the extra that adds a thrill.\n\nCappuccino should be consumed as a dessert, not as a breakfast beverage. It is warm, frothy, and wasted early in the morning. (Anyway, it often comes with a cookie, which proves my point.) Italians become unreasonably upset if you order it after the stroke of noon, but they are wrong. I always walk into bars in Italy about 2 p.m., ask for a cappuccino, and, when I get a funny look from the barman, respond by saying, \"I'm an American. I can have a cappuccino whenever I want.\"\n\nNo doughnut is worth eating more than an hour after it comes out of the fat, and that's cutting it close. The only establishment that never disappoints is Caf\u00E9 du Monde in New Orleans, where the doughnuts are sensational even if they are called beignets and are consumed outdoors in an uncomfortable tropical climate. Should you be in Mexico City, I highly recommend freshly made churros. Sure, I prefer funnel cake, but that's because I'm from Pennsylvania, not because it's better.\n\nWhenever I'm in Istanbul, and I travel there as often as possible, I invariably spend my free time searching for the ultimate Turkish baklava\u2014to me the greatest of all primal desserts, superior to the French tarte Tatin. Not much is as spectacular as honey and finely chopped nuts wrapped in flaky pastry that is minutes out of the oven. (Baklava becomes leaden quickly, as though it has some perverse ability to suck moisture out of the air.) I should also point out that Greek honey atop Greek yogurt is a magical combination, whereas any other honey atop any other yogurt is health food.\n\nFor years, whenever I was in London, I would dine in the Grill Room of the Connaught Hotel, enduring the most awful food in order to get to the rolling dessert chariot, which is absolutely without equal, although I might have loved the magnificent one at Le Bec-Fin in Philadelphia just as much had it offered English trifle and bread-and-butter pudding. A luncheon guest of the Grill was entitled to only one selection, but the waistcoated and white-jacketed captains and waiters who served the exclusive clientele always took pity on me, seeing that I had barely touched my appetizer or main course, invariably some woeful British concoction containing peas and crusts. They would allow me both of my favorites, and to be looked after by such gentlemen was a pleasure that could not be duplicated. I felt like a crown prince. Only desserts have the power to transport me to a realm above my station in life.\n\nI like to think I am open to new possibilities in desserts, although I suspect few men are capable of acquiring tastes for sweets they never had as a child. Recently, I went on an Asian-dessert excursion with Bernie Sun, a respected sommelier and beverage director for Jean-Georges Management, but we had little luck, probably due to an excess of red-bean paste in the pastries he selected. Perhaps I am not as open-minded as I think I am. At the end, exhausted, we sat down at the counter of the Brooklyn Diner (which is in Manhattan, not Brooklyn) for root-beer floats.\n\nI had never taken the root-beer float seriously, and yet it was Sun's contention that this is among the greatest of desserts. The Brooklyn Diner, it turned out, prepares root-beer floats with Stewart's root beer and H\u00E4agen-Dazs ice cream, an admirable combination. \"I think it's the perfect drink, in the same way that peanut butter and jelly is the perfect sandwich,\" Sun said. Indeed, he had a point. An overlooked aspect of this drink is that the melting vanilla ice cream cuts the bitterness of the root beer and adds a desirable velvety consistency\u2014root beer tends to be praised when it is creamy. Before this, I thought the finest dessert beverage was the vanilla milk shake, for not much is superior to vanilla in its most easily ingestible form, but I concede that the root-beer float is vastly more fascinating.\n\nIt is time now to speak of my greatest disappointment. I am referring to chocolate cake.\n\nThis may well be the most influential of our baked goods, and certainly the one most beloved by children. In my opinion, the chocolate cake with chocolate icing has fallen on hard times, and its potentially superior version, the devil's food cake, is also performing poorly. Such cakes are vital, for without them few birthday parties can be deemed successful. Such cakes need not be flawless. Spectacular is good enough. They are like New Year's Eve party hats\u2014Borsalinos they need not be.\n\nThe chocolate birthday cake fulfills expectations. To a child, it should not be homemade, for that reeks of the everyday. It must be a bakery cake to appear special, and it should come in a white box wrapped in string that's been pulled down from a skein of twine twirling overhead. It should have chocolate buttercream icing, and billowy roses crafted from icing are always a welcome addition\u2014mandatory for girls. A birthday cake reminds kids that they are special. It does not tell them that they are older\u2014the candles take care of that.\n\nI do not say this to stir up pity, although I'm sure it will, but I never had a chocolate birthday cake with chocolate icing as a child. As far as I can tell, Jews rarely bake traditional iced cakes, simply because icing typically contains butter and butter cannot be part of a kosher meal that also includes meat. In other words, a hot dog cannot be followed by chocolate icing in an observant household. (While my parents didn't keep kosher, they instinctively stuck to most of the rules.)\n\nMy sister recently reminded me of what we got on our birthdays: homemade, icing-free, white chiffon cakes topped with a reusable baby blue apparatus that had happy birthday spelled out in plastic script. Actually, most Jews do bake chocolate cakes. They never stop. But they are not the right kind. They are Bundt cakes, babkas, and kuchen, all without icing. My sister tried to convince me she made a wonderful chocolate cake and that if I came for a visit on my birthday, she would prepare one for me. She described it as a \"beet-chocolate Bundt cake.\" I shuddered and suggested she stick to her carrot-cake cupcakes with cream-cheese frosting, the best I've ever had.\n\nIs it any wonder that I become agitated as my birthday approaches and desperately seek alternatives to the homemade chocolate cakes that kindly relatives might thrust upon me? Thus far, I have failed in my mission.\n\nPatisseries, the obvious source of substitutes, have lost their way. The classic pastries in these once revered shops now remain on sale for two or three days, and invariably they are old and heavy. They've become the black holes of baking. My newfound disillusionment has done nothing to diminish my appetite for pastry. It has simply made my quest for satisfaction more challenging. Pastries, you see, have to fulfill several requirements. They must taste as good as you remember them. You must eat every morsel, even if you had every intention of taking only one or two measured bites. And you must ask yourself how you can get to that last dab of cr\u00E8me p\u00E2tissi\u00E8re without making a fool of yourself by licking your plate. Where does one go for such pleasures, if not to pastry shops? Well, there are always restaurants.\n\n\n\nMichael Laiskonis of Le Bernardin in New York is one of the best of the fancy-pastry chefs, although he still has to justify his existence to customers who think Mom's apple pie is every bit as good. Actually, it might be, for even an artiste as celebrated as Laiskonis admits, \"At home, I'm known to go through a pint of ice cream in one sitting.\" He also points out that he is totally fascinated by the Snickers bar\u2014chocolate coating, crunchy nuts, soft caramel, considerable enjoyment. \"You will notice that pastry chefs are always trying to replicate the Snickers bar in a refined way,\" he says.\n\n In the world of pastry, not much is more worthy of debate than the dichotomy between that which merely satisfies a craving and that which dazzles. Dorie Greenspan, who has written cookbooks with the greatest French pastry chefs, admits that \"every pastry chef's soft spot is homey desserts: pound cake, butter cookies, madeleines.\"\n\n To Laiskonis desserts exist in three categories: (1) \"The craving for sugar is hardwired into our DNA\u2014we are the only mammal that after breast-feeding retains that desire.\" (2) \"The role of comfort and nostalgia, which results from the great meaning that sweets have for children\u2014a lot of children, and I was one, steal and hide sweets.\" (3) \"Pure pleasure, bordering on gluttony, which results in dessert names such as Death by Chocolate.\"\n\n Elegant desserts, the kind traditionally served at restaurants such as Le Bernardin, are dazzling technically. They creatively incorporate structure, texture, and temperature.\n\n Greenspan compares eating fancy desserts to wearing Chanel clothing: dazzling and gratifying but not necessarily an everyday need. \"They are meant to be special and inspired, not a casual munch,\" she says. Laiskonis likes to point out that a successful pastry chef, unlike a savory chef, must dabble in psychology, because the craving for dessert is influenced by comfort, reward, and whatever diet or health trend is in vogue. At the same time, he says, a pastry chef cannot make too much of fashion, because chocolate desserts invariably outsell all others.\n\n And, he adds, \"You cannot discount the ego of the pastry chef creeping in, the desire to create something new\u2014and nothing much is new.\"\n\n Laiskonis served me three desserts, each designed to illustrate the passions of customers\u2014or in this case, himself. To him, a panna cotta satisfies the most primary of dessert desires: the longing for creamy, soft milk custard. Atop the custard was honey, almost certainly mankind's first sweet. His second dessert was warm chocolate cake, prepared with his favorite brand of luxury chocolate, Amedei from Italy, fulfilling the need for luxury and pleasure. Finally came the dessert that most appealed to me, one that evoked wistfulness. It was a small glass of warm spiced apple cider accompanied by tiny, still-warm-from-the-oven cinnamon doughnuts. When he noticed my obvious pleasure, he said, \"To me this suggests early autumn, a chilly Sunday, the days getting shorter, driving to a cider mill with the family, the crunch of leaves underfoot.\"\n\n Laiskonis, who grew up in Michigan, called cider-and-doughnuts his madeleine. I will admit that I have yet to find mine, which might be why my life feels vaguely unfulfilled. I have traveled extensively in my lifetime\u2014living in four countries, dabbling in two wars, and working for five newspapers and four magazines. Perhaps, had I found my madeleine, I would not always have been so unsettled.\n\n I am almost certain that when I find it, it will have something to do with ice cream, the fundamental food of my existence. Whenever I was conflicted over what dessert to order as a kid, my mother would say, \"You can't go wrong with ice cream.\"\n\n I've heard it said that a raspberry or some other piece of ripe fruit is the ultimate foodstuff, but I wouldn't know. Like most Americans, I never see ripe fruit. To me, vanilla ice cream is the ideal food, as well as a cure-all, providing the same essential service to disappointing desserts as ketchup provides to overcooked burgers. Vanilla ice cream is flawless. To have creaminess, sweetness, and coolness in one spoon is so astonishing I am continually amazed that ice cream is not a precious commodity, like black truffles or caviar.\n\n After vanilla, the building block of the ice cream family, there are really only two other fundamental kinds, green and all the others. Green ice cream is for kids, although I was never able to decide whether pistachio or mint chocolate chip was the greatest of the greens. (I come from a better time, when mint-chocolate-chip ice cream was not pasty white.) The Howard Johnson sugar cone topped with pistachio ice cream and dipped in chocolate sprinkles was the go-to cone of my childhood.\n\n At one time, I believed my unrelenting craving for ice cream was a perversity that should be hidden from others, but about fifteen years ago I telephoned the legendary food writer Craig Claiborne and invited him to dinner. He accepted, and for a reason I now understand, which is that everybody loves to be invited out by a food critic but nobody ever invites a food critic out.\n\n After our main courses, I suggested dessert, but he declined. He said, \"I'd rather go home and eat a bowl of ice cream.\"\n\n That simple declaration justified my existence. I knew at that moment I was born to be a food writer and would remain one the rest of my days.\n\n Alan Richman is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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