I have a class that uses several policies that are templated. It is called Dish in the following example. I store many of these Dishes in a vector (using a pointer to simple base class), but then I'd like to extract and use them. But I don't know their exact types.

Here is the code; it's a bit long, but really simple:

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>

struct DishBase {
  int id;
  DishBase(int i) : id(i) {}
};

std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream& out, const DishBase& d) {
  out << d.id;
  return out;
}

// Policy-based class:
template<class Appetizer, class Main, class Dessert>
class Dish : public DishBase {
  Appetizer appetizer_;
  Main main_;
  Dessert dessert_;
public:
  Dish(int id) : DishBase(id) {}
  const Appetizer& get_appetizer() { return appetizer_; }
  const Main& get_main() { return main_; }
  const Dessert& get_dessert() { return dessert_; }
};

struct Storage {
  typedef DishBase* value_type;
  typedef std::vector<value_type> Container;
  typedef Container::const_iterator const_iterator;
  Container container;
  Storage() {
    container.push_back(new Dish<int,double,float>(0));
    container.push_back(new Dish<double,int,double>(1));
    container.push_back(new Dish<int,int,int>(2));
  }
  ~Storage() {
    // delete objects
  }
  const_iterator begin() { return container.begin(); }
  const_iterator end() { return container.end(); }  
};

int main() {
  Storage s;
  for(Storage::const_iterator it = s.begin(); it != s.end(); ++it){
    std::cout << **it << std::endl;
    std::cout << "Dessert: " << *it->get_dessert() << std::endl; // ??
  }
  return 0;
}

The tricky part is here, in the main() function:

    std::cout << "Dessert: " << *it->get_dessert() << std::endl; // ??

How can I access the dessert? I don't even know the Dessert type (it is templated), let alone the complete type of the object that I'm getting from the storage.

This is just a toy example, but I think my code reduces to this. I'd just like to pass those Dish classes around, and different parts of the code will access different parts of it (in the example: its appetizer, main dish, or dessert).