Year of No Sugar (21 page)

Of course, they make gadgets to make the job easier, which don't. Over the years, we've tried them all and reverted every time to the good old thumbnail technique. Remember Jack Horner sticking in his thumb and pulling out a plum? It's kind of like that—and repeat four thousand times.

In order to minimize mess, I cover the dining room table
with garbage bags and clean dishrags. Every pitter gets a station at the table and a handy supply of paper towels with which to combat Sticky Elbow Syndrome. Both of our girls are usually enthused for about the first twenty minutes, at which point they wander off and find something less mind numbing to do. Sometimes my mom is up and we'll chat while we pit; other times I've sat and pitted by myself in a Zen-like, semicomatose state until I felt encased in juice much the way I imagine a mosquito trapped in sap must feel. (Steve counts himself among the champion cherry pickers of the universe, picking one whole flat for every handful the rest of us generate, and thus rationalizes his hasty escape when I start pulling out the colanders and plastic bags. Chicken.)

Doesn't matter. I carefully wash and measure out five cups of fruit per Ziploc bag, and off they go to the deep freeze until the time comes to make a pie or perhaps a nice batch of sour-sweet jam. At any given moment, I'd guess we have about nine pies' worth of cherries in our stand-up freezer, or, as Steve would say, “Not enough!”

So I knew a cherry pie would be high on the family list of “Desert Island Desserts.” After having chocolate cupcakes
and
chocolate mousse, I felt it was high time to demonstrate that dessert can exist perfectly well without chocolate, thank you.

Thus I was delighted to haul out my familiar marble rolling pin and board, drain the rich red juice from the thawed fruit, and measure out the (
gasp!
) sugar. Making the pie felt like greeting a dear friend I haven't seen in
so
long but who hasn't changed a bit. Mix defrosted fruit with sugar, add ice water to Cuisinart, roll out dough, butter the pie pan. If I have time, I always prefer to make a fancy lattice top, because it seems appropriate to the specialness of the dessert.
I usually swear under my breath later when I realize I put one of the dough strips over when it was supposed to go under, or vice versa, even though I'm certainly the only one who will ever notice.

This time, however, everything worked out just right: the lattice was perfect, I remembered to add the butter dots and brush with milk just before baking, and for once I even put on the “crust-protector” ring before the outer crust (which, being slightly higher, tends to brown much faster) was already irredeemably overdone.

Do I sound obsessed yet? Yes, I do love cherry pie. But I have to admit that it wouldn't be quite the same if we hadn't picked the fruit as a family one sunny day in June, or if I hadn't made it so many times before, always endeavoring to make it just a little more pretty, just a little more perfect—just because. There is no doubt that for me it is a labor of love.

We served the pie after dinner that night still just slightly warm and topped with a scoop of silky Wilcox vanilla ice cream. After so many weeks of No Added Sugar the blast of FRUIT with SUGAR and PASTRY—whoa! It was complete sensory overload. And it was
delicious
. The sugar went immediately to my head and made my brain feel like it was buzzing for about a half an hour. But above all, there was no question; it was
special
.

I put down my fork and felt happy, a little high, and utterly satisfied. “Now I am good,” I said to no one in particular. “Now I can go another month.”

I should've known, however, that something was afoot. That high feeling was my first indication that things were ever so slowly shifting: my taste buds, my body's reaction to sugar were all beginning to change.

By the time April came around, we were back to good old chocolate cake by request of Greta the Birthday Girl, on the occasion of her turning eleven. Fortunately, Greta wasn't having a traditional “kid” party, so all we really had to worry about was the family dessert. Phew.

The recipe I use for every chocolate-cake-requiring occasion is my grandmother's and ends up making an appearance in our house at least once a year. It's one of those funny old recipes that actually uses Crisco (gasp!) and instructs you to do all sorts of weird things like put baking soda in hot water before adding it to the batter and sour the milk by adding vinegar to it.

I love stuff like that. I love that my grandmother made this cake for my mom, my mom made this cake for me, and now I'm making it for my family. I love the weird instructions that harken back to an age when people thought nothing of taking the time to trace the cake pans with a pencil on wax paper to line the baking pans with. It's nice too, that it somehow results in a remarkably moist and not overly sweet cake that everyone seems to love. It is inevitably topped off with my mother's recipe for buttercream frosting, which is essentially a boatload of butter and powdered sugar thrown together with a teeny bit of vanilla.
That
part is awfully sweet, and every year I find myself wondering what
another
frosting might be like on my grandmother's chocolate cake (heresy!), but I haven't had the nerve to try it yet.

Of course, you only turn eleven once, so we really did it up by putting a small ball of vanilla ice cream on top of each slice. I have to admit, in addition to being delicious, the total effect was now achingly sweet to my recalibrating taste buds;
I felt instantly jittery and got a dramatic sugar rush to my head that lasted around half an hour. Oo—yuck.

Now a full four months into our Year of No Sugar, I was realizing, a firm taste shift was under way, and sweets were somehow, inexplicably, holding much, much less appeal for me. I enjoyed our monthly treat, but then also noticed that I was
paying
for it: I just felt…icky.

It wasn't till later that it occurred to me to do the math: the cake recipe called for
two
cups of granulated sugar, and the icing called for
three
cups of powdered sugar. We had divided the cake into twelve slices, so per serving that would be…holy cow! Nearly half a cup,
.41666667
, of sugar per serving!! And that's
not including the ice cream
. Well, no wonder I got a headache. It's a miracle my body didn't stage a full-scale
revolt
.

A few days later, Katrina and her kids stopped by on their way home from dinner and happened to have ice cream in the car for that night's dessert. Katrina said
of course
they would wait till they were home—they certainly wouldn't make us watch them eat ice cream while we ate that evening's No-Sugar dessert: a blueberry-and-lemon juice concoction Greta had invented while I made dinner.

Now, I was already proud of Greta's inventiveness in the pastry department, but then she
really
surprised me: “You can bring the ice cream up,” she said to our friends. “
Really!
I don't mind. I had birthday cake a few days ago. I'm good!”

Well, knock me over with a feather. Things really
were
changing.

There were certain things I really didn't
want
to change, though. There were two favorite desserts I had no intention
of going a full year without, sour cherry pie being one of them—which we had already made—and rhubarb pie being the other. Now that May was here, the funny, reddish, celery-like stalks had emerged from the ground and unfurled their giant, floppy leaves. It's a hearty, stubborn plant with a mind of its own—you accept rhubarb on its own terms or not at all. In the extended family of vegetables, rhubarb is the eccentric aunt with sunglasses and a large beach hat.

It's also one of those funny New England edibles—like gooseberries or husk cherries—that sound adorable and quaint to the uninitiated, rather like something our grand-parents might've made into a buckle or a crumble. Then, there are the devoted fans who know there are few things better than an ice-cold slice of rhubarb pie. We have two rhubarb plants in our garden—they've been here way longer than any particular homeowner—and every year we look forward to the first rhubarb pie of the season the way others look for the first robin sighting or the first blooming lilacs. It tells us that spring really has come at last.

And rhubarb and I go way back. My mom used to make rhubarb pie when I was growing up, which is weird, since we lived in the suburbs. I still have my mom's recipe, complete with her perfect five-minute Cuisinart crust, and I make it every year with an almost religious devotion. For me, eating that first bite of rhubarb sweet-sour pie is reliving a moment of childhood happiness.

So, of course, as soon as the stalks were up from the ground in spring, I set my sights on dear old rhubarb pie for our May monthly dessert. It almost came to a food fight though: Greta wanted coconut vanilla pudding cake and Ilsa had her heart set on a batch of sugar cookies. Nurturing my inner tyrant,
I decided that since neither of those choices was seasonally dependent—plus the fact that I had the distinct advantage of being the one who would actually
make
the dessert—rhubarb would prevail. Caesar lives.

_______

_______

The funny thing about pies is how much better they can get after a day of sitting in the refrigerator, getting chilled, and letting all those sweet and sour and buttery flavors rest and meld together. Rhubarb pie is a classic example of this: out of the oven it is really, really good. Out of the fridge the next day? Ridiculous. Amazing.

And yet.

Once again, something was amiss. You'd think I'd have figured this out by now, but it was continuing to throw me every month. Finally I realized it was this…this
taste
in my mouth, like the aftertaste you get from drinking a diet soda. Bleh! What
was
that? Then I knew: It was the
sugar
. Sugar and I, it seemed, were now like old friends who hadn't seen each other in so long that when they get together it's
fun
but…a little awkward.

As we approached August, I realized I had a problem we hadn't encountered up to now. You see, in August, my dad's birthday falls just one day before…my mom's
boyfriend's
birthday. Ahem. (Now, I don't know much about astrology, but it seems to me that there is something going on there.)

At any rate, this year, the girls and I would be traveling to celebrate
both
of these birthdays, and fortunately for us, my mom and dad don't live too far apart for that to be possible. But if you're like me, you've already realized the unique conundrum this posed for us this year: birthday cake.

Ah, the ever-ubiquitous birthday cake. It would foil me yet. Sooooooooo, what would be our August dessert?
Dad's
birthday cake? Or
John's
birthday cake? I pondered this. My brain resounded with the immortal wisdom of Highlander:
There can be only one!
What would we do? Uh…could we eat a half a piece of cake at each celebration? Would we skip dessert at
both
celebrations? Certainly we couldn't shun dessert at
one
birthday—that would be like choosing sides! I mean, these are two people I love in very different ways. They are apples and oranges. I'm grateful at least that their birthdays had the decency to fall one day apart, so I always have the opportunity to celebrate everyone—but this cake thing presented a new, unprecedented problem. For the first time in our entire Year of No Sugar, I had a choice to make: whose birthday got celebrated with sugar and…whose did
not
? Ack!

Ultimately, I used my understanding of the two birthday
honorees to figure it out. My dad is pretty adventurous when it comes to food and always willing to question tradition in the interest of trying something new. I knew he was interested in our family's No-Sugar project—we had had a series of conversations on the mysterious subject of what the heck we had been up to.

On the other hand, John, whose boyfriend status belies the fact that he has been with my mom for the last twenty-five years or so, is more of a person who knows what he likes and likes what he likes. For his birthday dinner, for example, we were going to the Italian restaurant that had been his favorite for the last few
decades
. He also has a very live-and-let-live philosophy—to all appearances, he is entirely neutral on the subject of our No-Sugar adventure.

Then there's my mom. Like Dad, Mom is supportive of our family project in spite of the fact that I'm pretty sure she's worried I fell on my head before coming up with the idea. Mom is the one who reads all my posts practically before I can even press “publish.” Yet, she's also the one from whom I got my love of celebrations and my implicit understanding that there are just certain things you
do
to celebrate a birthday. You have a special meal. You have decorations and presents and sing the birthday song. And you have a fabulous cake.

So it was decided that Mom would order a fabulous cake from the local fabulous bakery, and that would be our “official” August dessert. Meanwhile, I was planning to make dinner for Dad at his house, so I would make him his longstanding favorite for dessert: poppy seed cake.

Without
sugar.