Diane Borsato’s eyes dance as she surveys the colourful palette of offerings at Booza Emessa, a Syrian ice cream shop on Halifax’s Bedford Highway, contemplating how the three scoops she’ll select will complement one another. For the Toronto-based visual artist and art professor, looks are as important as taste.
Borsato ultimately chooses a darker-than-charcoal black vanilla, a pastel-toned blood orange and creamy white mastic, adorned with chopped pistachios. Traditional booza is stretchier and melts more slowly than North American ice cream, thanks to the mastic, or tree resin, used in its preparation and a style of churning that involves pounding with a wooden pestle.
Booza’s texture is a big draw for Borsato, which she describes in her book as
‘stretchy as wet marshmallows.’
On the ice cream shop’s patio, she admires the medley before scooping up some of the mastic (which, in the context of booza, is the basic, classic flavour), with her spoon.
“You know, these are aesthetic experiences, too. They’re like edible sculptures,” she says.
Borsato brings that artistic lens to her new book, Dessert Club, a genre-defying ode to her favourite global sweets. It’s part taxonomy of desserts and their origin stories – complete with whimsical illustrations by artist Kelsey Oseid – and part memoir, highlighting her notable first experiences with the dishes in question.
On a visit to Nova Scotia this past summer, she joined me for a dessert crawl through Bedford, a suburb of Halifax, where we savoured some of the treats she pays tribute to in her book.
We chose Bedford for a reason: It’s a part of Halifax that has grown rapidly in recent years and an influx of immigrants have opened up dozens of eateries in the area, making it one of the most exciting places in the city to eat. Within the radius of a few kilometres, one can sample Singaporean, Syrian, Lebanese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese and Turkish cuisine.
Borsato credits her own adventurous palate in part to growing up in Mississauga, where many of her classmates were newcomers or the children of newcomers. She’s found the suburbs a reliable place to start when in search of new desserts to try.
“Regions rich in immigrants are rich in delicious, interesting flavours and food traditions,” she says. And she’s observed that when immigrant groups butt up against each other, their cuisines naturally hybridize, giving way to things like tiramisu mochi doughnuts or ube lamingtons.
We find the latter at Tinàpe, a Filipino bakery on the ground floor of an apartment complex in West Bedford, and Borsato is in awe. She’s never before seen this riff on lamingtons, the Australian butter cakes typically coated in chocolate and shredded coconut.
Here, the coating of the cakes is tinted violet from ube, the purple yam used in many Filipino desserts. We pick up a package of those, as well as slices of ube mamon, layers of chiffon cake with just a few millimetres of buttercream holding them together. The cake’s crumb is an airy cloud and the cream tastes like whipped salted butter, only lightly sweetened.
“These are so delicious,” she gushes approvingly after a few bites.
It was in the homes of her childhood friends from the Philippines that Borsato first sampled ube-flavoured desserts. From then on, she’s approached the unfamiliar things on dessert menus or behind pastry cases with curiosity.
In her early 20s, she tried Taiwanese bubble tea for the first time, which was “a revelation.” A stint living in Japan not only influenced her art, but also her palate, introducing her to delights such as matcha parfaits and kakigori, a shaved-ice dessert. Borsato now makes itineraries for travels to international cities based around desserts she’d like to try. And in the past several years, she’s created a bond with her son, Felix, based largely on their shared sweet tooth.
Early on during pandemic lockdown, both mother and son were frustrated by online school. At one point, Borsato said, “We don’t have to do all that. We can just bake all day.” And so they did, conquering all manner of pastries. Her son now looks back on lockdown with nostalgia, she says.
Borsato wove through a maze of store shelves containing Indian groceries and housewares to order her falooda at a counter in the back of Brampton Cash and Carry.
“He was making beautiful things, and we were having nice moments, and we weren’t rattled with tension.”
Once restrictions lifted, the two started going on dates all over the Greater Toronto Area to sample desserts: from Palestinian kunafa made with stretchy Nabulsi cheese imported from the West Bank to the crispy rolled Mexican crepes filled with caramel and condensed milk called marquesita. Their lockdown kitchen experiments helped them develop a deeper appreciation for what they were eating: the technical skill, the time and the care that had gone into making these confections.
Their dessert excursions have given them a chance to taste the world but also experience molecular gastronomy and sample rare ingredients in a relatively affordable way.
“You can have an exquisite thing and it’s still cheaper than a cocktail in Toronto or eating dinner out,” Borsato says. “It’s like a nice little sample of something extraordinary, something that might be the best in the world. But it’s still under $20.”
Now a teenager, Felix often communicates with his mother through Instagram DMs – he’ll send a post about a strawberry tart with “impossibly perfect slices of strawberries in a geometric spiral,” or a new neighbourhood cafe making the Hong Kong-style fruit soups filled with pearls of sago and coconut milk he knows his mother adores.
It was through Instagram that I learned that an Indian grocer on Bedford Highway called Brampton Cash and Carry served one of the desserts Borsato was interested in sampling on our crawl: royal falooda. Tucked at the back, past all the aisles stocked with prepackaged masalas, stainless steel cookware and hefty sacks of basmati rice, there was a massive display of mithai (Indian sweets) and a wall-mounted digital menu advertising snacks and drinks.
When presented with the royal falooda, Borsato eyed it with disappointment. The versions she’d had in the past were as much a feast for the eyes as the tongue: a tall sundae glass filled with a rainbow of colours from sweet syrups, creamy ice cream, chopped nuts and chewy jellies, basil seeds and vermicelli. This one was less of a showstopper, served in a beige takeout bowl with muted colours and a small amount of toppings.
Ever the art professor, she headed back to the counter and asked if they could add more garnish, make it look more pleasing to the eye. After a minute, the falooda was returned to her, now with more crimson rose syrup, chopped nuts and shimmering edible silver leaf. The ratios still seemed off, but this was an improvement.
Borsato picked up a fork, winding the syrup-slicked vermicelli around it like one would with strands of spaghetti. With great optimism, she took a few bites and then set her fork down. “I want to save space to taste other things,” she said diplomatically. As she’s learned through a lifetime of dessert exploration, not every dish is a winner, and that’s okay.
We get back in the car and start driving to our next stop, an infinite number of delicious possibilities on the road ahead.