A few weeks ago, a friend and I were having lunch at Mariposa, the posh Neiman Marcus café in Coral Gables, when we noticed the waitress bringing a luscious piece of raspberry and chocolate cake to two women at the next table who still were in the midst of their main course.

We watched in disbelief as the older of the two, an elegant lady in her 70s, began sinking her fork into the cake between mouthfuls of pasta. Turning to us, she laughed and introduced herself in Spanish as Ester Sanz.

''You probably already know I am Cuban like you,'' she said. ``Eating dessert together with a main course is a habit of mine since I was a child. It was the only way my mother could make me eat -- mixing something sweet like dessert with my food.''

I laughed, too, in recognition. I also was a finicky eater as a child, and the cooks of my family lured me to eat nutritious foods like red kidney bean puree by adding tiny pieces of guava paste or mango. Even to this day, I love to mix something sweet -- sliced banana, perhaps, or ripe pineapple -- with my savory food, even steak.

Ester and I are hardly alone. Most any Cuban will tell you that a touch of sweetness is what they need to make a meal feel complete. For some of us, this penchant borders on an obsession. I know of a woman who has to have fried ripe plantains with every meal and of people who would not eat dinner without a side of guava paste.

The happy confluence of savory and sweet in Cuban cuisine is one regional expression of a flavor code born in medieval Spain and perpetuated in colonial Latin America, where sweetness and saltiness were not segregated into separate culinary divisions.

Cubans often add white sugar to black beans, but we do not sweeten savories with brown sugar (papelón) like the Venezuelans do (they have the sweetest tooth in Latin America). But we love cooking poultry and beef with raisins, and prefer sweet side dishes, especially sweet viandas -- starchy tropical tubers and vegetables.

Because of their high sugar content, ripe plantains have a place of honor on our blue-plate specials, often simply fried. Cooked with sugar, butter and wine or rum until beautifully glazed, they go by several names: plátanos borrachos (drunken plantains), plátanos guisados (braised plantains) or plátanos en tentación (plantain temptation). Back in Cuba, my aunts braised them in sweet sherry and served them with thick, juicy slices of braised eye-of-round stuffed with olives, chorizo and raisins (boliche mechado).

Boniatos -- white tropical sweet potatoes -- are denser, starchier and considerably less sweet than their orange-fleshed North American counterparts. Cuban cooks remedy this deficit by boiling them in sugar water, turning them into French fries (boniatico frito) and sprinkling with sugar, or glazing them with sugar and butter in the same tempting manner as plantains.

My friend María Rodríguez, a fellow native of Santiago de Cuba, boils boniato with sugar and butter until the water evaporates and the tubers caramelize. When she visited me recently, we tried a quicker variation: We boiled boniato rounds and glazed them in a simple caramel that we made in a separate pan.

The boniato, which ordinarily has a grayish-blue cast, looked gorgeous with its gilding. And its buttery sweetness was a wonderful foil for our main course, salt cod studded with briny olives and bathed in a tart tomato sauce (bacalao compuesto). With a bowl of steamy rice, it was a perfect Sunday meal.

It is in such harmonious counterpoint between sweet and savory that Cuban food achieves its final, seductive balance.

Culinary historian Maricel E. Presilla is the chef/co-owner of Cucharamama and Zafra in Hoboken, N.J. Her latest book is The New Taste of Chocolate.

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