Dessert – Exploring North African Dessert: Alexandria

I have not made this dish but I will attempt an answer based on the recipe I found and linked to in my above comment.

• Melt butter in a 4 qt pot. Break vermicelli into 3" pieces. Over low heat stir vermicelli into butter until it turns light brown. Pour in the milk and stir over medium heat until it boils. Put in the raisins, almonds and sugar.
• Continue to cook under low heat for 10 minutes. Add whipping cream and continue to cook for a couple of minutes. Remove from heat and, when cool, chill in the refrigerator before serving

According to this recipe, the vermicelli is added before the milk (whipping cream), so it looks like it begins to cook with the butter at the start of the cooking process, and continues to cook with the heated milk portion of the recipe. Hopefully this answers your question.

The only thing which makes food considered appropriate as a dessert is cultural convention. This is obvious once you observe the differences between cultures.

In some cases, the difference is very clear-cut. The only tastes acceptable for desserts are sweet and sour, with sweet being banned from all other courses. This is common in cuisines inheriting Ottoman traditions. Desserts there are very sweet, and the addition of a sweet taste to a main dish (e.g. duck with oranges) or non-sweet to a dessert (e.g. salty caramel) is considered very strange and unpleasant. Other modern cultures are more permissive. There are well-known sweet-and-savory pairings even in Western cuisine (the abovementioned salty caramel, melon with ham, sugar-glazed carrots), and Asian and South American cuisines seem to be even more prone to such mixes (e.g. a meat pie in a plantain crust). Then there are cases where no sweet dessert is eaten at all, for example the French tradition of viewing a cheese plate as a dessert. And historically, there was no distinction at all, with nobility eating everything expensive they had mixed in a single dish, so that you had rose water mixed with black pepepr, rice and honey served to meat, for example. There is a reason why older books on English cuisine list "savoury puddings", even though today "pudding" in its broad sense has come to mean "dessert". For further reading, also see this article - it is mostly on food pairings, but you can see how North American cuisine builds two clusters of food combinations, one centered on baked desserts (flour, eggs, vanilla) and the other one on savory ingredients, while in Asian pairings, the effect is much less pronounced.

That said, I suspect that if you are serving your dessert to people with predominantly Western upbringing, they would have hard time accepting something very meaty as a dessert. While ham with apricot and almonds is an acceptable combination by Anglo-Saxon standards, it is not served for dessert. I would make something with a strong fruit component, and combine with a small amount of delicate meat. A fruit salad with a few shreds of proscuito should work. Alternatively, you could take some meat without much taste on its own, like chicken breast, include it in some kind of filling, and combine with lots of fruit.