Three sisters dessert

Making desserts can be an agricultural act 🌽

I start this week's essay using Wendell Berry’s quote ‘Eating is an agricultural act’ and applying it to cooking, particularly to making desserts. For years I have seen cooks, chefs and bakers, all being at the forefront of a movement that calls for more awareness of climate change in food, agriculture and food systems in general. I am one of these cooks, but at times I have felt frustrated because desserts and sweet treats tend to be forgotten in this narrative. After all, sugar is not needed to fuel us. However, when we indulge, we should still consider the environment and food systems in our desserts. Sweet desserts such as pies, cakes, cookies, and pain aux chocolat should always be considered seasonal because all their ingredients are seasonal and have people, soil and animals behind them.

A few years ago, I attended the UK Grain Lab at Small Food Bakery. There, I listened to an eye-opening discussion regarding the seasonality of croissants. Croissants, despite them being around the whole year, should be seasonal. This, is mainly because cow’s milk and butter depend on the grass cows are eating. Summer grass is not strictly the same as winter grass and this subtle difference ultimately impacts the water content and flavour of the dairy products. The same applies to flour; wheat can be divided into two distinct growing seasons: winter and spring. The crop is classified as either “spring” or “winter”, depending on when the seed is planted and when it germinates. Fall is when you start growing winter wheat for a summer harvest. This enables the crop to thrive in locations that experience extreme drought throughout the summer by making use of fall and winter precipitation. To survive the late fall and winter months, young plants need to grow between 4 and 6 inches (10 and 15 cm) tall. The crop’s roots are hardy enough to last through the winter and continue growing once the temperature warms up again in the spring.

Since I attended that eye-opening discussion, I have incorporated this thought process when creating a new dessert, aiming to be a pastry chef who considers the environment, people and animals at the forefront of a plate. With these thoughts in mind, I came up with a dessert called “the three sisters”, while working at Vanderlyle and using locally grown produce.

The mandatory ice cream quenelle

The three sisters or Milpas

For at least 7,000 years, farmers in Mexico and throughout Mesoamerica, have been growing crops using an ancient farming system called the milpa. The system involves intercropping, meaning many different crop species are seasonally grown together in the same space. The name “milpa” comes from Náhuatl, the original language of the Aztec people, and means “what is sown in the field.” The milpa has long represented the key to ensuring food security for many indigenous and rural populations in Mexico and is one of the most effective ways to safeguard and reproduce ancestral seeds. The composition of the milpa varies depending on the region, but the most typical crops (and therefore the most representative of the local diet) are corn, beans and pumpkins.

The term Three Sisters refers to corn 🌽 (Zea mays), beans 🫘 (Phaseolus vulgaris), and squash (Cucurbita spp.). Each crop complements the other two so growing the plants together provides greater benefits than planting them as single crops. The milpa system has been a sustainable crop-growing method for millennia, however, the ongoing climate crisis is currently threatening this system’s resilience. The preservation of milpas is mostly in the hands of Mexican women who are responsible for protecting and pass on their ancestral knowledge, strengthening their identity, preserving the soil fertility and providing their families with fresh, nutritious, local food, while also safeguarding agricultural biodiversity.

I can’t put it in words better than what Robin Wall Kimerer did in Braiding Sweetgrass.

“I hold in my hand the genius of indigenous agriculture, the Three Sisters. Together these plants— corn, beans, and squash—feed the people, feed the land, and feed our imaginations, telling us how we might live.

For millennia, from Mexico to Montana, women have mounded up the earth and laid these three seeds in the ground, all in the same square foot of soil. When the colonists on the Massachusetts shore first saw indigenous gardens, they inferred that the savages did not know how to farm. To their minds, a garden meant straight rows of single species, not a three-dimensional sprawl of abundance. And yet they ate their fill and asked for more, and more again.

Once planted in the May-moist earth, the corn seed takes on water quickly, its seed coat thin and its starchy contents, the endosperm, drawing water to it. The moisture triggers enzymes under the skin that cleave the starch into sugars, fueling the growth of the corn embryo that is nestled in the point of the seed. Thus corn is the first to emerge from the ground, a slender white spike that greens within hours of finding the light. A single leaf unfurls, and then another. Corn is all alone at first, while the others are getting ready.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Three Sisters planting method, Grace Rodgers/USFWS.

Approaching food with an awareness of its environmental and cultural significance illustrates how cooking and baking can be celebrated as a tribute to all ingredients. It represents a return to food made with love and abundance sourced from farms and fields. My aim is for you to develop a similar appreciation in your kitchen—falling in love with the process of cooking, understanding the origins of ingredients, and cultivating curiosity about how certain ingredients form the foundation of various cultural culinary traditions.

Three sisters dessert recipe

Kabocha squash ice cream

Ingredients