Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word "dessert" comes from the French desservir, meaning "to clear the table," referring to the final course served after the table was cleared. One of the earliest known uses in a culinary context appears in the Ménagier de Paris from 1393, which includes a course called "desserte" in three of its menus.
In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the dessert course consisted entirely of foods from the storeroom, including fresh, stewed, preserved, and dried fruits; fruit jellies; nuts; cheese; dry biscuits and wafers; and, from the mid-eighteenth century onward, ices and petits fours. Freshly prepared pastries and custards were served in a separate entremets course until the twentieth century.
Sugarcane was grown and refined in India before 500 BC and was crystallized by AD 500. Sugar reached Macedonia by 303 BC and China by AD 600. Sugar remained rare in Europe until the twelfth century or later, when the Crusades and colonization spread its use.
Frozen desserts became very popular starting in the 1920s, driven by the mass production of foodstuffs that followed the Industrial Revolution. Ice cream parlors have existed since before 1800.
The pavlova is named after Anna Pavlova, the dancer who visited both New Zealand and Australia in the 1920s. Both countries have a long-standing debate over which one invented the dessert.
Tong sui, also known as tim tong and literally translated as "sugar water," is a collective term for sweet warm soups or custards served as dessert in Cantonese cuisine. It is a Cantonese specialty rarely found in other regional cuisines of China.