This would be a dull column if I just banged on about how much I love rice pudding, ice cream, meringues, golden syrup dumplings, anything with salty caramel, and pretty much every cake and biscuit – even if I do have reams to say about them. So let’s delve a little deeper into our love of sweet.

1. It’s only natural

We can argue over whether there are four, five or six tastes (naturally, it’s the French who feel fat should join umami with the others), but one thing we can agree on is that sweet is the most loved. Sweet foods are usually packed with calories, which means our cave-dwelling ancestors knew what to eat to survive. But it is more than just a learned understanding. Scientific studies have shown that newborns prefer liquids sweeter than breast milk; nature as much as nurture has given us the ability to detect and appreciate sweetness. The problem with human physiology combined with modern eating habits is that we can be a slave to easy sugar fixes and their associated health problems. To make matters worse, research implies that as we eat more sweet foods, our brain chemistry alters and, like a drug addict, we search for an ever-increasing sugar hit to satisfy cravings.

2. It’s the new seasoning

This might be confronting, but I’d like to challenge a commonly followed rule. For generations recipes have ended with: “season with salt and pepper”. This is wrong on two accounts; firstly pepper is a spice and you can’t season with spice. Secondly, salt only pulls into focus one of taste’s four main dimensions. Seasoning is about balancing and highlighting flavours, so shouldn’t you also season with something sweet and sour? I have been experimenting by finishing dishes with a little salt, sugar and lemon juice or vinegar as required. While it’s more complex, it can make all the difference – even to something as simple as a tomato sauce.

3. Because it loves the enemy

Sweetness is a New Testament sort of taste, as it gets on so well with its rivals. It doesn’t matter whether it’s teamed with acidity in an orange sweet-and-sour sauce over battered pork at your local Chinese, or elegantly partnered with an Italian accent in a vinegar and sugar-kissed agrodolce sauce of onions with pan-fried calf’s liver. The other enemy that sweet has increasingly been embracing is salt, and this delicious dichotomy underpins much of the junk food on our supermarket shelves and menus of fast food restaurants. In the last decade or so, this addictive contradiction has been pinpointed by top chefs, too, such as Thomas Keller, who have taught us to sprinkle some salt flakes on our chocolate or caramel tarts.

4. There’s nothing sweeter than a root

Today, refined sucrose from sugar beet, part of the same family that has the silverbeet and beetroot, delivers between 20 to 30 per cent of the world’s sugar. In Australia, we are sugar cane people and we like our roots pulled straight from their garden beds. Carrots, beetroots, parsnips and sweet potatoes are all root vegetables that put a sweet smile on our faces come winter. Needless to say, roasting these root vegies concentrates their sweetness for bigger flavour. For example, raw sweet potatoes are about four per cent sugar (which is more than sweet corn).

5. Revenge is sweet

And as Alfred Hitchcock wisely stated, revenge is also not fattening. Now there’s a sweet thought!

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