WATCHING MOVIES featuring mouthwatering desserts can appease our craving for sweets through visual bliss, but they also add more depth to the narrative. Planting little clues in the manner a character eats a simple piece of cake can reveal a lot about their personality. Similarly, including a scene with a dainty pastry can change the direction of the plot in the most unpredictable way. As such, desserts are more than just a feast for the eyes as they enrich the essence of the film.

A “not so terrible” strudel from Inglourious Basterds

   An innocent slice of strudel, filled with a luscious mixture of fruits and wrapped in thinly layered pastry, looks scrumptious yet dreadful in Inglourious Basterds, a film manifesting Quentin Tarantino’s take on the Nazis’ defeat in the Second World War. In this film, Tarantino gave birth to one of the most complex and terrifying villains in cinema history through his depiction of Colonel Hans Landa, the infamous “Jew Hunter.” Shosanna Dreyfus, a Jewish escapee living in France under an alias, unwillingly sits opposite Landa at the dinner table, agitated by his presence. He immediately establishes his dominance by ordering strudel for both of them without asking what she wants. 

   The tension in the scene is palpable as the audience questions if Landa recognizes Shosanna from four years when he and his men murdered her family. He skillfully manipulates and stirs the conversation between them to gain more information about her, all while carelessly eating away his slice of strudel with a smug look on his face. The strudel is supposed to be a delight but is visibly hard for Shosanna to chew and swallow under the watchful gaze of Landa. The tension builds up as he asks more probing questions about her fabricated identity, leading the viewer to wonder if Landa will ever drop the “big bomb.” Upon leaving the dinner table, Landa sticks his cigarette into the strudel, much like one would plunge a knife into someone’s back. His treatment of the strudel perfectly reflects what kind of a man Landa is: he toys with his opponents while soaking up their fear and strikes them without hesitation when the time comes for the final blow. The delicate dessert is ruined, and so is Shosanna, who breaks down into tears once the source of her agony finally leaves the room. 

The Help’s chocolate pie with a surprise

   Dark, decadent, and rich, the chocolate pie made from a buttery crust and a fudgy filling comes with an unpleasant addition to its recipe. In the 1960s, most African American women in the Deep South worked as domestic workers for white families and were called “the help.” They faced racism and discrimination from their own employers to the point where they had to use separate toilets. This is exactly what Minny, one of the film’s main characters, goes through daily as she endures her employer’s derogatory attitude in order to feed her family. She is soon fired after her employer catches her using the “whites only” bathroom during a storm. Despite all of the injustice, Minny has the last word when she executes a nasty and delicious revenge. 

   In this pie scene, Minny presents her employer Hilly with a delectable chocolate pie as a peace offering. Joyfully gobbling down not just one but two slices, Hilly continues to display arrogance without knowing what is coming. The power balance between the two flips as the pie turns out to contain a not-so-tasty ingredient: Minny’s feces. Watching the awful character get her well-deserved punishment after falsely accusing Minny of stealing is both horrid and satisfying, but even such a sickening twist does not stop the dessert from looking any less appetizing. 

A deceptive courtesan au chocolat from The Grand Budapest Hotel

   Not only does this small tower of elegant, cream-filled pastries looks aesthetically pleasing, but it also holds extreme significance to the plot development in the The Grand Budapest Hotel. The film follows the crazy adventures of Zero, a loyal lobby boy, and Gustave, an esteemed concierge, who work at the Grand Budapest Hotel set in 20th century Europe. It also features a fictional pastry shop called Mendl’s, beloved for its exquisite and elaborate confections. Gustave is particularly fond of the bakery’s courtesan au chocolat, which is based on a real dessert named religieuse, a two-tiered pastry glazed with a classic chocolate ganache. In a typical Wes Anderson fashion, the film takes the dessert up a notch by adding one more tier to the tower and covering it with eye-catching pastel hues. The dessert’s delicate visual exterior creates an interesting juxtaposition against its hidden interior loaded with rich chocolate custard. 

   This pastry plays a vital role in Gustave’s escape from prison as it inspires him and his jail mates to hide the digging tools necessary for their breakout inside Mendl’s desserts. Zero’s lover Agatha happens to be an apprentice baker at Mendl’s and agrees to help disguise the tools. The plan proves successful in a whimsical scene showing a prison guard refusing to ravage and inspect such stunning pastries for smuggled goods, moving on to demolishing another, more ordinary food product. A deceptive dessert indeed, courtesan au chocolat becomes an accidental hero and steals the show from an already ridiculous yet enthralling storyline.

Little Forest’s motherly siru-tteok

   In Little Forest, Hye-won runs away from her suffocating life in Seoul to her hometown in desperate need to eat comforting soul food. Back home, she recreates the recipes of her mother, who left her when she was a teenager. Amongst her recipes is siru-tteok, a beautifully stacked rice cake made up of three colors: green, white, and yellow, with a red bean layer on top. Once done, Hye-won’s cake looks identical to her mother’s, but the taste is not quite the same. This irritates Hye-won as she tries to replicate her mother’s recipes as closely as possible. This scene reveals that although Hye-won feels hurt by her mother leaving her behind, she continues to chase the nostalgia of her warmth through the delicious food and memories associated with her.

   The movie’s food stylist Jin Hee-won revealed that making the three-layered rice cake was the biggest challenge among all of the dishes in the movie, mainly because rice cakes are sensitive to changes in temperature[1]. A sequence from the movie perfectly illustrates how laborious cooking this cake can be as it requires making natural food coloring, mixing it into flour, and getting the right texture. This reveals how effort and dedication behind a mother’s homey meal are sometimes improperly acknowledged without having gone through the process yourself. The result looks heavenly, and the soft, steaming slice of cake enticingly invites the audience to take a comforting bite of warm, motherly love. 

[1] Korea JoongAng Daily