I’ve occasionally thought that after-dinner mints/candies/etc were as important a part of the meal as the main course, or if not as important then not far off.

This isn’t always true — forgetting the times, of course, where there is no post-meal treat at all, and forgetting, also, anytime where the candy was red or yellow or some other generic fruit colour and contained, inside, an awful sugary jelly, which, as you chew would mix together into a mass of glass stuck in tree sap, cutting apart your mouth as it dissolved.

There is a ritual involved if the whole experience — generally lasting about 53 seconds — is unique enough, and that doesn’t take much, since the process of receiving and eating an after-dinner mint or candy is a fairly simple one and therefore quite easy to make particularly memorable.

Fortune cookies are probably too obvious to deserve a mention, but that is exactly why you will read about them now. They are the familiar and dependable addition to a litany of East Asian — and imitation — cuisine. It is there, always the same sweet and crunchy cookie shaped like a malformed pillow, even when the food itself is so terrible that you can’t bother to finish it, even though when the server comes by and asks how things are (the gall to ask such a question of this chewy shrimp covered in a too-much-tomato “Schezuan” sauce!), I eagerly replied, “It’s fantastic, thank you very much,” with a smile on my face that hid my profound disappointment and deep sense of betrayal. And, with clockwork precision, there will be a piece of wisdom inside that cookie, and usually a collection losing lottery numbers on the back.

Most people can remember those rare occasions when their fortune cookie had not one but two long slips of paper inside. Fewer can recall that special moment when, after either ripping the cookie apart in their hands or biting off one end, they found three glorious fortunes — and three equally useless collections of lottery numbers. These are good memories, that exist separate from — and in some cases in spite of — the food that was eaten just moments before.

And it goes on. I remember the slices of orange served at this small hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in uptown Calgary, and the difficulty of ripping the juicy orange flesh off the peel while trying to appear civilized, but I can’t recall what I ate or how it tasted.

There’s a Greek restaurant in downtown Halifax that finishes your meal with one of two small candy balls of sugar, either peppermint or licorice, that radiate flavour the way an exploding sun would cover the Earth in fire. I would go back, even if I had to throw the food away, just to taste those candies on my tongue.

While not edible, at the Flamingo Palace the meal is followed by hot napkins that were brought out in the same type of red and white plastic jug they would serve the steamed rice in. When we returned years later, in its new location, the food was nothing that warranted the 20-minute drive downtown, but those napkins, allowing you to wipe of your hands with an unmatched sense of refreshment, were still there.

While I have some of my fondest dining memories in the dozens of Indian restaurants that are peppered throughout Calgary, and two that call Halifax home, some of them blend together or fade away entirely. If I try to remember what I ate at this small Indian restaurant a few minutes east of my former high school in Calgary, I draw a blank. But I can recall quite vividly, while waiting to leave on a brisk winter evening, gently sprinkling a spoonful of candy-coated fennel seeds into my hand and then casually tossing them into my mouth, thinking how amazing it is that a seed can naturally taste so much like black licorice, one of my favourite childhood candies.

So I like after-dinner candies. Most, I’ll admit, will hold no lasting significance, but the thing about after-dinner candies is that you don’t know their significance until well after the fact. So I cherish the toffees and the scotch mints and the white candies painted in green or red swirls. I know I always appear to eager to unwrap my jawbreaker or gumdrop or Werther’s Original, while everyone else begins to put on their coats and calculate their portion of the bill.

And I always feel like everything is going to be a bit better in the world on those days when, whether by accident or because the person I’m with has no idea what they’re passing up, I can eat two.