How common is it for cultures to end meals with something sweet?

[nancylebov]

Seth Roberts has found that for enough people to make it interesting, a tablespoon of raw honey before going to sleep improves both sleep and (quite surprisingly) strength.

His arguments for why this is plausible don't strike me as very strong, and it seems to me I've heard that dessert is hardly universal, and (very faint memory) there are cultures that put something sweet at a different point in the meal. Anyone have details?

In any case, a dessert after dinner isn't the same timing as something sweet right before bedtime.

I'm going to try out the tablespoon of honey-- I'll post about the effects, if any.

Comments

[siderea]

it seems to me I've heard that dessert is hardly universal, and (very faint memory) there are cultures that put something sweet at a different point in the meal.

Yeah, ours. To quote wikipedia:

"Soup to nuts" is an American English idiom conveying the meaning of "from beginning to end". It is derived from the description of a full course dinner, in which courses progress from soup to a dessert of nuts. It is comparable to expressions in other languages, such as the Latin phrase ab ovo usque ad mala ("from the egg to the apples"), describing the typical Roman meal.

It was impressed upon me in the SCA that there was no mapping of sweets to the last course of a Medieval feast. Here's an actual example menu for a proposed feast, from the 14th cen. (Vocab: "Blang Mang" == blancmange, which we'd consider a dessert, except at that time might have included chicken; "frumenty" is what happens when you try to make oatmeal from wheat, and like oatmeal can be prepared either sweet or savory, or, in the Middle Ages, both at the same time. They did not separate sweet and savory as we do. Think General Gau's Chicken for a modern example of the idea. Gods, now I'm hungry. This is why getting modern people to eat actual authentic medieval recipes isn't actually all that hard. :9)

ETA: AUGH, now I want medieval noshes SO BAD.