Year of No Sugar (26 page)

Once again, Randy let me try my hand at the procedure, and anyone who knows me pretty well will need to be revived after hearing that I eviscerated two still-warm bird bodies with Randy's helpful direction. I'm not sure why, but all my squeamishness disappeared. Perhaps it was the beginning-to-end nature of the process. Perhaps it was the fact that Randy helpfully talked me through each one, lung scraping and all. Perhaps I was just too fascinated by the fact that yes, each bird body was exactly the
same
on the inside!
Yup, there's the heart, right in the same place as the last one!
I was struck by the
amazing predictability of biology. Is this how surgeons come to see people, I wondered, as different outwardly, perhaps, but basically just identical walking amalgamations of organs? “Yup, there's the heart, right in the same place as the last one.”

I guess you end up thinking some odd things while pulling the organs out of a chicken.

Finally the bird is dunked in a spring-water bath to cool. Here they await the arrival of Annie on the scene to remove them from the bath, blot them inside and out with paper towels, and carefully wrap them for storage in the freezer. And you know what? It looks like chicken.

Fifty-two chickens, fifty-two weeks. Randy and Annie now had a freezer full of the finest-quality organic meat that will last them for an entire year. They knew where it came from. They knew what it had eaten, what it was treated like, and how it died. They had taken responsibility, on a very basic level, for their food.

Attending “processing day” surely isn't for everyone. But it was nice for me, at the very least, to spend and hour or two acknowledging where all that chicken we eat actually comes from—a silly, awkward animal, that still deserves our kindness and respect.

_______

Of course, looking back over our food history, domesticated animals are only one part of the meat story. Since moving to Vermont, I've become much better acquainted with the most ancient kind of meat procurement: hunting.

Fortunately, the fact that I'm a meat eater now means that our family can look forward to enjoying the spoils of the hunt even though we
didn't
get up at the crack of dawn to go sit in
a cold tree stand sprinkled with deer urine for several hours. Then again, who knows? At the rate we're going, maybe in another ten years we'll be doing that too.

If you had asked me to define “game supper” before I moved to Vermont fourteen years ago, I probably would've guessed a potluck involving Scrabble or possibly Bridge. At that time I was a confirmed “city mouse.” To my mind the mention of “game” probably meant it was time to argue over who gets to be the top hat and who has to be the boot.

I can imagine how horrified
that
version of me would've been—the me who insisted that our sit-down wedding dinner for one hundred consist entirely of vegetables and fish—to encounter the annual festival of carnivorousness that is the Vermont Game Supper.

Every November (read: deer season), each town in our area has their own Game Supper benefitting deserving local causes such as the volunteer fire department and the sixth grade field trip. We had been to our local Game Supper for the last few years and the menu was reliable: Moose Meatballs (the whole reason to go), Bear Steak (to say you've had it), Chicken and Biscuits (for the very squeamish), and Venison, Venison, Venison. Venison Stew, Venison Steak, Venison Sausage, and if you're in luck, maybe Gib made his famous Venison Salami—only one piece per customer please, supplies are limited.

Of course there are sides too—mashed potatoes and squash—if you have any room left on your plate, which you won't. Salads, rolls, and paper plates filled with cocktail-size blocks of Vermont cheddar wait on the tables once you're done running the buffet line. And if you're
still
hungry—which you won't be—and still eating sugar (read: everyone
except us), there's always the yawning expanse of the dessert table, with slices of apple, lemon merengue, and chocolate pie making kids drool from all the way over by the fire exit sign.

But the word on the street was, “Pssst!
Rupert's Game Supper is better
.” So this year we decided it was time to check that one out too. Why was Rupert's Game Supper better? Well, for one thing they used real dishes (not paper plates that sag under the weight of your Fred Flintstone-esque meal)
and
they can be counted on to have game even more unique than moose and bear. Which is how I came to try beaver. It's also how I came to spit beaver out into my napkin .0395 second later.

If anyone ever asks you to define what “gamey” tastes like, you should send them to try a nice dish of beaver. One friend remarked that eating beaver is like “eating an oil slick” and I have to say I couldn't agree more. But I
tried
it.

Another key difference between our town's and Rupert's suppers is that they wear funny hats at the Rupert Game Supper—antler headbands, chicken hats, sombreros, you name it. Nobody I asked knew why.

This year, however, I had a whole new appreciation for our Game Suppers as the one local event we could attend with confidence in our Year of No Sugar. The distinctions were crystal clear: the meat was on one side of the room, and the sugar was on the other. After all the back handsprings we'd done to ferret out fructose this year, the clarity of this division was quite comforting.

Which returns me to an increasingly familiar refrain: the idea of going back in time a bit in order to avoid the health impacts our over-processed, over-convenient lifestyle has bestowed upon us. There is a point at which all the hippy-dippy themes—no sugar, no plastics, no pesticides, eat
local—start to converge; suddenly we begin to see what it is we've been driving at all along: what Great-Grandma used to cook. And much of it looked a lot like the Game Supper.

Although I'm pretty sure Great-Grandma never wore a funny hat.

_______

One thing Great-Grandma
did
do that actually involved large quantities of sugar was make jam. Personally, I love to make jam. Every year I look forward to the various local harvests anticipating what interesting flavor I'll be able to concoct: peach-strawberry jam? Jalapeno pepper jelly? One year we ended up with a large bag of Italian plums that I cooked up, causing the entire house to smell of stewed prunes.
Oh no!
I thought.
Prune jam?
But in fact the
plum
jam was delicious.

But this year, of course, I had gone back and forth on the issue. To jam or not to jam? That was the question. Sure, jam was the kids' “exception food,” so I could justify it on those grounds. But would I really be able to spend hours slaving over vats of boiling water and sterilized tongs only to
not
partake of the results myself? I wasn't sure I had willpower enough for that, so I held off.

It wasn't until September rolled around that the Concord grapes were weighing down my arbor with fragrant fruit that I decided I could stand it no more; I tried making a No-Sugar Grape Jelly. I had my work cut out for me. If you've never made jelly or jam, then you might be astounded to know exactly how much sugar is ordinarily devoted to the average batch; most jams contain more sugar than actual fruit—much more. It's not uncommon at all for a batch of, say, blueberry
jam to call for seven cups of sugar. Yes.
Seven
. This works out roughly to a cup of sugar per pint jar. Think of
that
the next time you have toast.

And, like baking, jam isn't super improvisable. Unlike making a stew or omelet, where you can just throw in what you've got and get something edible at the end, jam is rather inconveniently science-y. In order to get jam or jelly to set up correctly, i.e., get that gelatinous, not-quite-liquid-not-quite-solid consistency, you have to have an appropriate amount of pectin, which naturally occurs in fruit and more so in unripe fruit. In the olden days, making jam must truly have been an art form: figuring out what percentage of ripe to unripe fruit to use, and after cooking, testing with a cold spoon to see if the jam had set properly, before beginning the long, hot procedure of boiling your sterile jars filled with jam to make them seal correctly for storage.

These days, most jelly and jam makers add powdered pectin to the cooking fruit, which ensures that your jam will set up like a golden retriever every time. In recent years, I've made many batches of delicious jam in just this way. So I wondered: What if I made a jelly that followed all the instructions but substituted
dextrose
for sugar? Would it work?

This was going to be a lonely journey, however. If you are a modern canner, then you know that the literature available about canning today is not for the faint of heart. “WHATEVER YOU DO,” they all read in the most alarming font they can find, “DO NOT, REPEAT, DO NOT TAMPER WITH THESE RECIPES IN ANY WAY OR YOU AND EVERYONE YOU'VE EVER LOVED WILL MOST ASSUREDLY DIE FROM SOME TERRIBLE FLESH-EATING BACTERIA!!!!” I have at least four books
with canning recipes, and they all say virtually the same thing: no improvisation allowed. NONE. Story's over, go to bed.

Meanwhile, if you talk to the old-timers, the ones who canned decades ago with crazy things like rubber seals and wax, you get an entirely different story. They all say the same thing: “Oh, it's
fine
. Don't worry. Jam is incredibly hard to spoil! And even if it does mold on the top a bit, you just scrape that bit off and eat it anyway.” Now, I probably wouldn't go so far as to eat mold-encrusted jam, but wasn't there a happy medium we could arrive at here? Was a homemade no-sugar jam possible?

As I mentioned, the Concord grapevines in my backyard were sagging with fruit so I decided I would try my experiment on these. This added an extra step—I usually prefer jam with nice big chunks of fruit and skin throughout, but Concord grapes have to be made into jelly, not jam, because of the seeds and tough skins, which must be removed. After cooking and straining the grapes through cheesecloth, I began to boil the sweet juice.

Now right here I realized I already had a problem. Uh…juice? I stopped right in the middle of my steaming, pulp-slopped kitchen with the sudden realization. We haven't had
juice
since January 1, even as a sweetener. Year of No Sugar Rule #302: fruit must have corresponding fiber attached. Period. Huh. Why hadn't I thought of this before? What should I do? Well, I was dying to know if my experiment would work, and, I rationalized, if it did, it
could
be extrapolated to jams, which
would
include the skins and pulp. But today grapes were what I had to work with. So, onward.

Now, every box of pectin from the supermarket comes
with a long list of instructions for most types of jam or jelly you might want to make, so I dutifully followed the grape instructions to the letter: After discarding the seeds, skins, and pulp, I brought five and a half cups of my fresh Concord grape juice to a boil in a large open pot on the stove. This, by the way, is my favorite part of making jam or jelly—the incredible fresh cooking-fruit smell that permeates every corner of your home. Potpourri has nothing on this. If I were to invent a perfume, I think it might be Concord Grape No. 5 or quite possibly L'eau de Peach.

At this part of the procedure, with the boiling fruit in one pot and empty glass jars sterilizing surgically in another, I always feel like I'm engaged in some wonderful alchemical process that will transform some delicious but humble fruit into pure edible magic. They're so beautiful, jars of jam in translucent hues sitting glinting on our shelves, waiting to remind us in the depths of a Vermont winter what the tastes of summer were. In the case of our Concord grapes, it's even better because they're free: the things grow like weeds in our backyard, no matter how badly we treat them, but due to the seeds and skins, they aren't much of a tasty snack. Without the jelly, this wonderful taste would pretty much go to waste, enjoyed by our backyard birds alone.

So I followed the recipe. After boiling the intense, incredibly purple juice for ten minutes, I added a quarter cup of dextrose (instead of the called-for sugar) to a bowl containing the pectin powder and stirred this into the pot. (This is an extra step you do with what I buy, which is Low-Sugar Pectin; it enables you to use less sugar in your jam, say
five
cups of sugar instead of seven. Seriously.) Brought to a boil, I then added the rest of the dextrose—three and a half more
cups—boiled it exactly one minute and then removed it from heat, and I began ladling into sterilized jars.

Actually, I cooked it longer than one minute, trying to ascertain whether the set-up would really occur using the dextrose. It
looked
right—gelatinous and jelly-ish. But I'd always relied on the alchemy of the pectin-sugar combination to do this part for me, so I was nervous. The boiling purple lava was ladled into the jars, hot lids screwed on “fingertip tight,” and into the bigger pot they went for the final sterilization. The filled jars boiled underwater for the requisite five minutes before being pulled out with jar tongs to cool on a dish towel.

What do you want to hear first, the good news or the bad news? The bad news is that my jelly didn't set. The good news is that we proceeded to do what jelly and jam makers have done with failed jelly and jam since time immemorial: we had a lovely sauce. The kids liked it on crackers and on toast. It was sweet…ish. Unlike any jelly I'd had or made before, it truly tasted of the unalloyed grapes. Now, if only the set could be improved…

My research continued. I was determined to figure out what went wrong, and this was when I began to learn a lot of disturbing things. For one, guess what store-bought low-sugar pectin has
in
it? Now, if you can't guess by now, I'm going to be veeeeeeeery disappointed. Yes! SUGAR. That's right: the low-sugar pectin—“for use with less sugar!”—has
sugar
in it. How ironic. How totally predictable.