Savoring Sugar

Desserts Past, Present, and Future are the stars of Dixie Poché’s new book, Louisiana Sweets: King Cakes, Bread Pudding, and Sweet Dough Pie. The Lafayette-based travel writer gets rather Dickensian  (but trade that tacky soot for powdered sugar) as she lays outs a picture of the state’s love affair with sweets through history, anecdotes, recipes, restaurant profiles, and more.

There are the desserts our elders smacked through as their cultures embedded into Louisiana—zucker plätschen (German sugar cookie), gâteau de sirop (syrup cake), Italian fig cookies and cannoli for a St. Joseph’s Day Altar—and the characters we owe our gratitude, like “the Duke of Plessis-Praslin, whose chef invented sugar-coated almonds [pralines] as a means to cure indigestion.” Then come the treats we eat today—of seasonal interest, Poché devotes ample territory to king cake classics and innovations. And looking ahead, the author’s wisest intuition is that a Louisianan often just wants to know where her next to-die-for meal is coming from: thus, specific addresses are given for the dozens of sugar-clouded confectioneries Poché highlights along the way. 

[Read this: Kings of Cake: Five flavors to stoke your pre-Lenten indulgences.]

With all that driving you’re bound to be doing—we bet you can make a day trip of Blue Southern Comfort Foods in Shreveport for key lime pie, back down to Champagne’s Breaux Bridge Bakery for the signature pink cookie, then a scenic route, for digestive purposes, to Berrytown Corner Cafe in Ponchatoula for strawberry beignets—your first read through Louisiana Sweets might take a few weeks.

[You might like: Shreveport Eats: Our neighbor to the north has an impressive restaurant scene.]

Consider the time well spent for the newfound appreciation you’ll have for each sugary bite and all that precipitated it. (Quick, before that doberge cake melts on your tongue, say a quick thank-you to baking legend Beulah Ledner!) For fun at home, the included recipes like Hungarian Settlement’s palacsinta (Hungarian crepes Suzette) and Houmas House Plantation’s Chocolate Wild Turkey Crème Brûlée will be a treat for your own kitchen as well as anyone within its orbit. Say, what’s your address?

Louisiana Sweets: King Cakes, Bread Pudding, and Sweet Dough Pie by Dixie Poché. 160 pages. Arcadia Publishing. 2017. Paperback. $21.99.