Shoot

Good evenin'.

Yesterday or the day before I spent an eternity pecking out two salad recipes and then in the spastic flicker of a little finger, blew them both to heck--plus the accompanying tirade of text.

I got so mad.

Too mad to waste my valuable time copying them out again. But the point of the recipes need not be lost:  Neither of the salads, both from the pre-1980 era, had any sugar within a mile of it.  There was no sugar in the dressing.  There were no sugared walnuts nor sweet dried cranberries to augment their flavors.  Just look in any cookbook of the era. There was plenty of oil, vinegar, lemon juice, salt, pepper, mustard,--even paprika. But no sugar.

Just try to find any recipe now without sugar. Gravies, sauces, dressings now seem to have to have that certain level of sweetness to meet editorial approval.  And I'll tell you a little secret:  In order to balance that much sweetness you need an extra dose of sodium chloride.  It's a seasoning habit that has grown into our culinary lore with a big downside to it.  Where we once had thin energetic women like my Mama, we now have land whales.

Land whales, I tell you.  Plus a "diabetes 2" culture.  Bad. All Bad.

Imagine a cookbook with no hint of sugar in any recipe except for the dessert pages. That's ANY cookbook from pre-Depression to 1980. Then, a great fear arose among the populace, a fear of oil, butter, fat, grease.  Take all those out of the cuisine and you've gotta compensate with something, and that something in our case was sugar.

Bad.  All Bad. 

We need to get our old House and Garden Cookbook, our old Fannie Farmer, and follow them to the letter of the law.  Let the influence of sweetness in meat dishes, salads, vegetable dishes just slither away.  Taste what your grandmother tasted when she cooked the family dinner. It was good and it was healthy.  And even in a dessert loving family like MY grandmothers, nobody was a land whale and nobody got Diabetes 2.

It's true. And you do NOT get dessert unless you've had your supper and you do NOT get seconds on dessert even if fat old Uncle Bert gets them when he comes to call. YAZZYBEL