Year of No Sugar by Eve O. Schaub Page A

Of course, the bars weren’t nearly as sweet as before, but they were sweet, primarily due to the cooked apricot filling. They failed tobrown nicely on the top, but this problem was solved down the road with the addition of egg to the crust ingredients.
    So far, I had yet to hack any failed experiments into the trash with an ice pick. I was astounded. Perhaps there was something to this winging-it approach.
    I found other recipes online and continued experimenting; there was a nice raisin and apple cookie that could be a little awkwardly concocted by sautéing the fruit then adding it to the dry ingredients, and chilling it in the fridge overnight before baking. After weeks of thinking wistfully of treats gone by, I was ecstatic to simply eat a cookie again, although I secretly worried some aspect of the “banana pudding effect” might still be at work, to wit: it only tastes good to us because we were—to put it nicely—desperate.
    No matter. I was coming to realize that treats are in the eye of the beholder. Emboldened by my first few attempts, I began altering cookie recipes that had been long-held favorites in our house: peanut butter, oatmeal raisin, Nestle Toll House chocolate chip. I tried to develop a system of sorts, a kind of No-Sugar Conversion Chart: in place of white sugar, I would use an equivalent amount of mashed banana; in place of brown sugar, that amount of chopped dates; and in place of chocolate chips, carob chips. (It wouldn’t be until much later in the year that I would realize carob too was, in fact, off the table for us, being a processed sweetener itself. It would not be our first mistake, and certainly was not our last.) These experiments were simultaneously heartening and disappointing. On the one hand, they all resulted in solid, reliable, sweet, no-sugar cookies. I brought them to knitting night and potlucks, offered them to our friend’s children. Even the non-sugar-starved agreed—they were pretty good cookies.
    Not “the-best-cookie-you-ever-ate” good, but good enough that every kid I gave them to said “yummy” and ate the whole thing. (I feel kids are the most dependable taste testers because they’re the ones who have no qualms about spitting a cookie out on your linoleum, whether it hurts your feelings or not.) The big problem with my No-Sugar Conversion Chart, however, was this: everything came out the same —tasting like bananas and dates. The peanut butter cookies tasted like bananas and dates. The oatmeal raisin and the carob chip? Like bananas and dates. Sure, they were serviceable recipes, but due to the fact that my sweetening agents had some rather loud tastes of their own to express (BANANA! DATE!), they only really made one cookie.
    Nevertheless it was really, really nice to be able to put a cookie in each of our kid’s lunches in the morning; like so many times in the past when I had sent sugar desserts, I felt like I was sending them a little edible love note. I realized sugar wasn’t the only thing I felt starved of—it was also the very concept of being able to provide a treat as a sign of affection. After all, if sugar is used as a symbol of affection (which it surely is—just ask the people who sell heart-shaped boxes of candy), then what does that make the lady who imposes on her family a Year of No Sugar? The Anti-Mommy? The culinary equivalent of Joan Crawford? The Grinch?
    As if this weren’t bad enough, in abstaining from sugar, we were, naturally, going to have to stay away from one of the key “crops” of our many neighbors: maple syrup. We live in Vermont, after all, famous to the world for pretty much three things: fall foliage, straight-shooting but excitable presidential candidates, and maple syrup. Thus, not only were we abandoning love in the form of sugar, we were also abandoningsome very real component of local pride or patriotism that took the form of sugar.
    If you