Sugar Blues

By William Dufty, 1975

Chapter 14: Soup to Nuts

It is a miracle if one finds a canned soup at the store without sugar or chemical preservatives in it. If you’re kicking sugar, you’re on your own in this department. Homemade soup is a cinch to create. The only work is in foraging for the good ingredients.

I keep on hand a supply of dried split peas, pinto beans, and lentils. They combine beautifully with staple vegetables like onions, leeks, carrots, and celery. Variations are possible with the seasonal vegetables — pumpkin, squash, sweet corn, beets, turnips, and parsnips.

Soak dried peas or beans overnight in cool water. If you want to be adventurous, try soaking a small piece of dried wakame — a Japanese sea vegetable available in many natural food stores — with them. The minerals in the wakame help reduce the cooking time and add a savory flavor.

Soups are simplicity itself.

Start with good vegetable oil, unfiltered sesame or corn oil, or a combination of the two. Sauté chopped onion in a heavy pot Add chopped celery, perhaps carrots. Slowly pour in the soaked peas and water. Bring to a low boil and simmer slowly for an hour, until the soaked vegetables are soft and edible but not mushy. Let the soup rest. When it’s time to serve the soup, warm it again. Pour into individual bowls and add tamari, a traditional soy sauce that has sea salt in it. (Traditional Japanese soy sauce tamari is a live food, naturally fermented and aged in wood for two years and made without chemicals or preservatives. Its ingredients are water, soybeans, wheat, and sea salt. The brand I use is imported and sold in America under the Erewhon label. Many other soy sauces on the U.S. market are made with sugar and other chemicals to reduce the fermentation time.)

This is the basic recipe. The variations are endless.

If good onions are available, onion soup will stand on its own. Or, go heavy on celery, put it through the blender after it’s cooked, and you have cream of celery. Use chopped beets and beet tops, with a little cabbage, and you have a kind of borscht. Add slices of pumpkin and/or butternut squash to the onion, sauté it until soft, add water, and you have pumpkin soup. When I use pumpkin or squash, I prefer heavy soybean oil instead of sesame. Combined with onion and butternut squash this tastes — to me anyway — like cream of tomato.

If you can find leeks, use them in addition to or in place of the onion, then you are moving in the direction of what used to be called vichyssoise; thicken it with oat flour. I avoid tomatoes and potatoes in soup. I also avoid using most grains in my soups except barley. A little barley added to almost any combination of vegetables gives a completely different texture and flavor.

I make a beautiful double corn soup which is a meal in itself. Sauté chopped onions in oil. When the onions are golden, stir a half cup or more of stone ground yellow or white corn meal into the oil and onion, and gently sauté. (Chopped green pepper adds color and flavor.) After the corn meal has gently simmered in the oil, water is added gradually as if making a gravy. As it thickens, more and more water is added. This simmers for almost an hour. Shortly before serving, add kernels of fresh corn off the cob and serve with tamari. Off-season, one can use frozen corn (cook it until it is thawed and chewy).

With such soups as this, you never have to write down a recipe.

Go Italian by making an onion and celery stock and adding slices of romaine or escarole. Decorate the soup bowls with tiny slices of chopped scallion, as the Japanese do. Use carrot tops and the roots of leeks — as the French do — if you chop them finely and sauté them well. Go heavy on the cabbage like the Russians and the Irish. You can use rolled oats — or oat flour — instead of corn, as the Scotch and Irish do. Or use onion stock and add chopped uncooked vegetables and end up the Mediterranean way. The point is, if you can find decent vegetables, you’ll have great soup. The tamari takes care of the seasoning.

Among American sugar-pushing people killers, Fannie Farmer is certainly the queen. Whether she reflected the Victorian era or influenced it, we’ll never know. Certainly, her cookbooks were bibles in the American kitchens at the turn of the century. She started as a pupil at the Boston Cooking School, perhaps many of her recipes were stolen from the headmistress Mrs. Lincoln, whose less successful cookbook was published years before that of Fannie Farmer.

For decades, women have been stealing recipes from Fannie. Perhaps she was encouraged by the Sugar Lobby! We do know that it is fitting she was immortalized as the face on a candy box. For she was one — if not the — originator of the deadly idea of adding sugar to practically everything: Bread, vegetables, salads, and their dressings.

In the salad section of the Fannie Farmer cookbook, published in 1896, recipes for salad dressing advocated pouring in the sugar. As successive editions came along, tomato aspics were made truly lethal by adding sugar. Sugar was used to speed up the leavening of bread. Fannie went way beyond that to the point that Europeans tasting American bread thought of it as cake. And that’s what it was.

Her mania for adding sugar culminates in the 1965 edition of her cookbook, which suggests taking commercial mayonnaise (already sugared) and adding two parts of it to one part of sugar and two parts of lemon juice and other seasonings. Then she says Shake well. It certainly will.

It is virtually impossible today to buy bottled mayonnaise or salad dressing of any kind without finding it already loaded with sugar. If you begin messing around with Jello and flavored gelatin (which is heavily sugared) and add canned fruit in sugared syrup, one ends up with a typical American salad. Many women eat nothing but this kind of sugar bomb and imagine they are dieting. Small wonder they complain that their menfolks resist those colorful concoctions they use to dress up the table. Everyone would be much better off eating the flowers in the centerpiece.

Ketchup, mayonnaise, and the various combinations thereof called Russian dressings are loaded with sugar. Sugar is in everything, including the pickles. If you want to kick sugar, you may have to rethink the whole subject of salads. Remember, in 1905, the Japanese licked the Russians, perhaps you will try a Japanese salad. Easy to make and great for your stomach, it combines well with almost any other food. Compact enough to be carried in a small jar, it keeps practically forever. Pressed salad is made by adding pieces of salted vegetables to a crock covered with a weighted, fitted board. If you have a crock and a rock, fine. If not, a couple of bowls, one fitted inside the other are perfect Use a jug of water as a weight.

Oriental vegetables such as Chinese cabbage or bok choy are great for pressed salad, but practically any vegetables will do. Lettuce, escarole, romaine, dandelion greens, beets, celery, onions, turnips (don’t forget to use the tops of celery, beets, radishes, carrots, and turnips), scallions, chives, mustard greens, and radishes — both white and red; I avoid strong leaves such as spinach and kale. Cucumbers combine with almost any green vegetable and are great alone. I start by washing off the dirt and grit from the leaves. (Whenever I wash vegetables that are particularly full of earth, I remember the American woman in Paris. When we agreed it was great to be able to buy fresh vegetables in the French open-air neighborhood markets, she made a terrible face and said, But they’re so dirty.) If you’re lucky enough to have vegetables (perhaps from your garden or someone else’s) grown without chemicals and insecticides, on composted soil, they have real taste. If they have real taste, chances are they have dirt on them. After you wash and dry them, cut them into small pieces. Then put into a bowl (or a crock if you have one) in layers, dusting each layer with a small amount of sea salt. In France, one buys sea salt at the supermarket in a plastic bag, you then roast slightly and grind. Most natural food stores or gourmet shops have quality, finely ground sea salt. I won’t touch the kind that pours when it rains; it contains sugar. After dusting the layered vegetables, place the smaller bowl inside the larger bowl, which contains the vegetables. Put something heavy inside the top bowl in the way of a weight. When I’m traveling, I often use a wooden cutting board on top of the bowl, onto which I pile books, a traveling iron, lamp, or whatever I lay eyes on. If you have an open crock, have a woodworking friend make you a fitted wooden lid and bring home a very Zen rock from the beach to serve as a permanent weight.

After an hour in the crock, the pressed salad is usually ready. Remove the weight, pour off the liquid, and serve with a dash of tamari soy sauce. If you like, add a little unrefined sesame oil. If fibrous vegetables like turnips and carrots are stiff, return them to the crock (or whatever) for more squeezing. The Japanese make gorgeous pickles the same way, sometimes a sprinkling of rice bran and herbs is added. The vegetables stand in the brine for days, even weeks. The action of the salt on the vegetables makes for a complete transformation, a totally different taste.

A pressed salad can become a main dish: Cook a bowl of whole wheat or buckwheat macaroni, drain it, mix in a little sesame oil and soy sauce, and then add to the vegetables. You’ll hardly miss the commercial sugared mayonnaise. If you do, some natural food stores have mayonnaise made from fertile eggs, decent oil, and a little honey instead of sugar. Mayonnaise can be thinned with soy sauce and lemon juice; use it until you have weaned your family off commercial mixtures they think they can’t live without.

Tomatoes and avocados are tropical fruits. I do not use them in salads at all. If you are in the tropics and want an avocado, I found the best to do is to eat it all by itself, with a little soy sauce or tamari. Tomatoes and potatoes I skip altogether. You can make a potato salad with pressed vegetables, using them in the same way you use whole wheat or buckwheat pasta. Buckwheat pasta, by the way, is a Japanese delicacy called soba, not much appreciated in America. Buckwheat is full of rutin — the stuff one pays an arm and a leg for when buying vitamin pills. (I know women who examine themselves periodically for signs of visible broken veins or unsightly tiny, blue capillaries. As soon as they find anything like this they head for the buckwheat. Try it and see. If your doctor has varicose veins in his nose, tell him about buckwheat. Never let a doctor examine you without examining him just as carefully. Many of them need all the help one can offer.)

No salad makes sense to me anymore without a dash of homegrown sprouts. In the Orient, they were sprouting grains, beans, and legumes for centuries before anyone ever heard of vitamin C. Today, when decent fresh vegetables and greens cost an arm and a leg, everybody who can has his or her own garden. For sprouts, one doesn’t need a compost heap, a patch of earth, or a sunny windowsill. One can even grow them in jail. All you need is a Mason jar, fresh water, and seeds: Alfalfa, mung beans, or lentils. Many natural food stores and gourmet shops have tricky little devices for sprouting seeds painlessly. Some are crockery contraptions; others are simply Mason jars with removable screened tops. Follow the instructions and within hours or days, you’ll have more sprouts than you can eat. (They keep in the refrigerator for days.) Add sprouts to salads or use them in more complicated dishes. The seeds and legumes can be bought in bulk in any natural food store.

Once you’ve had success with sprouts, you’re ready to grow herbs, wheat grass, and buckwheat lettuce on the windowsill. When one of your house plants gives up the ghost, don’t pitch out the earth with the plant Keep it, water it, and when the earth is good and moist, scatter the soil with wheat berries or unroasted buckwheat groats that have been soaked for a few hours in fresh water. Keep the earth moist and within a few hours, the wheat berries will send out little tentacles, root themselves, and begin shooting up straight green grass. When the wheatgrass is 6 to 8 inches high, just cut a handful of grass, as you do with chives. Use the buckwheat lettuce like watercress. Chew it instead of chewing gum. You’ll be astonished at the natural sweetness. You chew and you chew. Then there comes a point on which there are two schools of thought. Either you swallow the grass or you spit it out. It’s loaded with vitamins and minerals and better than drugstore items for any ailments. Animals cure themselves using certain kinds of grass as medicine. When they feel ill, they quit eating and chew nothing but certain grasses until they have recovered. This makes a great game for kids — especially if you’re trying to help them kick chewing gum or candy. Here is a natural sweet they can grow themselves.

After collecting almost fifty million dollars a year for umpteen years, promising the donors that if they give and give someone could find a cure for heart disease in their lifetime, the American Heart Association has belatedly admitted that nobody can stop you from digging your grave with your teeth.

The Heart Association published, with great hoopla, an official cookbook for fat-controlled eating. It tells you how to count cholesterol the way people used to count calories. We hardly needed them to tell us after all these years that safflower, sesame, and corn oil are better than lard, margarine, butter, and some of the other gooky cooking fats on the market. They have come up with some other helpful hints (a low cholesterol omelet made with one egg yolk and three whites) but they still don’t differentiate between eggs and eggs. Natural fertile eggs, in England these are free-range eggs laid by chickens allowed to pick their own food, and sterile eggs, the kind laid by zombie chickens trapped in assembly line prison hatcheries. If a hen sits on a fertile egg (the kind you used to be able to get in the country), it will turn into a baby chicken. If a hen sits on a sterile egg, it will turn into a stinking mess. A good egg is hard to find. The other kind is usually available at the supermarket.

The Reader’s Digest got on the bandwagon by publishing with great fanfare excerpts from the American Heart Association’s Cookbook as The Fat Controlled Diet. I couldn’t resist skimming through their recipes to see what all the noise was about. Despite all the scientific work that has been published connecting high sugar intake with heart disease, the American Heart Association approaches the subject of sugar gingerly.

Eat foods that will satisfy your daily needs for protein, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. Your appetite will then be satisfied to a greater degree by usable food elements, rather than by empty calories, such as those found in sugar.

They still can’t seem to move beyond the old, discredited notion that sugar is merely harmless, empty, or naked calories. Grains and cereals, we are told, do not contain cholesterol. What they do contain, they don’t tell us. Don’t load up on rich dairy products like butter, ice cream, and whole milk. Convenience foods may be inconvenient for fat-controlled eating. Desserts can be adapted in a way to cut down butter and egg yolks.

When it comes to the recipes, it’s fat-free, low-cholesterol, Fannie Farmer all the way. Sugar in the bread, the pancakes, the coffee cake, the muffins, and the rolls. Grape jelly and cranberry sauce with hamburgers; mayonnaise with mousse; cornflakes, and cooked (sugared) fruits with the main course. All this sugar before one reaches dessert. When you do get to the fat-controlled desserts, all except one are laced with sugar.

I am grateful to the AHA Cookbook for one thing. I don’t like their recipe much but the garbanzo dip reminded me of a great dish based on an Arab delicacy called hummus tahini. Two kinds of tahini exist: The blond tahini made from peeled seeds and the dark variety made from roasted seeds which is called sesame butter. It is close in taste to the familiar peanut butter. Without the tahini (as the AHA suggests) — a blond paste made out of crushed sesame seeds which has been a staple in the Middle East for centuries — the dip is a pale thing indeed. Canned garbanzos are suggested. I prefer to start with dried chickpeas from a natural food store. Who needs to buy all that canned water? Soak the dried garbanzos in water overnight and then simmer them in the same water over a low flame until soft. I use a small piece of Japanese seaweed called kombu in the soaking and cooking. It speeds things up and adds cholesterol-free nutrients of its own.

Now we come to the garlic. Nobody can pretend to tell you how much garlic to put in the dish. It depends on your taste. It also depends on the garlic. I used to think I knew something about garlic. That was before I visited the ancient town of Fleurance in Gascony, southwestern France. Here is garlic such as you’ve never tasted before — grown without chemical fertilizer or insecticides. The mayor of Fleurance is the famous natural healer and herbalist Maurice Messegue (see Chapter 3). His goal in life is to make the name of his town synonymous with the greatest natural food in Europe, if not the world. (The incomparable chickens from Fleurance are on the menu — complete with billing — at Maxim’s in Paris.) The garlic grown around Fleurance is so rich and juicy it explodes with flavor and juices when sliced open. Messegue says garlic is a great tonic and healer but dangerous if grown synthetically because toxic chemicals tend to be concentrated in the cloves. I returned from Fleurance with garlic in blue sacks tied with green ribbons. One large clove of garlic from Fleurance might suit your taste for the dish. If you have to settle for the tired dried stuff peddled in most cities, you might need a whole bulb. Eventually, Neiman Marcus in Dallas will carry Fleurance garlic. Others will not be far behind once the quality is made known. Ask for it and look for those blue and green sacks.

Several kinds of blonde tahini are on the market. The one I prefer is imported and packaged by Erewhon of Boston and Los Angeles. Put the cooked garbanzos in your blender, with enough cooking water to cover. Add the tahini, garlic, and a good dash of tamari soy sauce. Mix it, then taste. If it doesn’t grab you, adjust the flavor by adding either beans, tahini, soy sauce, or garlic. It’s a great dip and a fabulous open-faced sandwich. Use it to stuff celery instead of some fattening cheese. This dip is loaded with everything that’s good for you and, unlike dips made with mayonnaise, it’s completely sugar-free.

Once you begin to develop respect for the food you cook and eat, you come to have the same respect for the precision of the French language. No wonder French was the language of diplomacy; its economy and precision also made it the language of international cuisine.

In French, for instance, Riz complet is rice with all the natural minerals and vitamins intact, unpolished, and unprocessed. In English, one has to make do with the appellation brown rice — an inexact description of its color. This makes all sorts of hanky panky possible. A little coloring is added to polished rice, and it’s sold in the supermarket as brown rice. It’s brown, all right, but nowhere near being complete.

In French, the word for grape is raisin. What we call the raisin in English, the French call raisin sec. Dried grape. We need to be reminded that the raisin is a dried grape. The concentrated grape sugar of the raisin makes it an ideal natural sweetener. The dried currant is not quite so sweet, but it has a tart flavor all its own. Then there are dried apples, peaches, pears, plums (called prunes, which is French for plum), apricots, cherries, and raspberries. Of course, one can buy dried bananas and pineapples but I have learned to leave tropical fruits to the tropics and concentrate on native fruits. What’s natural for the Eskimo is different from what’s natural for the Fiji Islander, right?

Try the marvelous dried and salted Japanese plum, the umeboshi. It’s virtually unknown in this country outside Japanese stores. Used traditionally in Japanese herbal medicine, umeboshi is also a great ally in the kitchen, especially with other dried fruit.

Drying fruit in season to keep it for the long winter months is an old custom. Fruit that’s been sun-dried without chemical preservatives has a spectacular flavor. It’s quite different from sugared, canned fruit. It keeps well and takes up little space. With a few jars of dried fruit, umeboshi plums, and nuts on hand, you’re ready for some sensory discoveries. When you give up man-refined sugar you open yourself to an entirely new range of flavors — many of which, ironically, predominated in the old-fashioned goodies! Another accessory I use all the time is dried lemon and orange peel (stored in a glass jar).

The combinations are endless. Start with dried apples, raisins, and a little lemon peel. Soak a handful of dried apples in cool water. If they absorb all the water, add more. Chop the raisins with a knife, so that their sweetness is let loose through the whole compote. Add dried lemon peel and bring to a slow simmer. Let the mixture bubble for some twenty minutes, then turn off the heat and let the pot stand. Use the concoction as it is; put it through the blender and call it applesauce; or thicken it with a little arrowroot and use it for pie or tart filling. Next time, add dried chestnuts. Chestnuts and apples combine beautifully. Or use currants instead of raisins.

For a different fruit compote, combine currants, apricots, and lemon peel. Or currants and pears. Each of these combinations is enhanced by the addition of salted umeboshi plum (remove the pit if you wish). The salted plum acts as a catalyst, converting flavors.

I usually keep a jar of stewed fruit in the refrigerator. With that on hand, I can turn out a pie, a compote, or a mysterious fruit pudding in an instant. Put the fruit through the blender, add a little arrowroot-water mixture, and turn it into a sherbet glass where it cools and jells like you know what.

Most of the canned and packaged puddings on the market are loaded with sugar. Kids are used to the texture and the color. I’ve had some success weaning youngsters off sugared puddings by making a whipped mixture out of stewed dried fruit and tahini (the latter has been used as a milk substitute for centuries in Arab countries). Soak a cup of dried apricots or apples in water with lemon peel and an umeboshi plum. Stew slowly over a low flame for several minutes, then cool. Put the mixture into the blender with several tablespoons of tahini and blend. Pour this into individual dishes to serve. I sometimes add a dash of coconut on top.

With pie crust, like everything else, the trick is finding the perfect ingredients: Organically grown, stone-ground, whole wheat pastry flour; organically grown, stoneground, whole corn meal; sesame oil made from the first pressing, without the application of external heat, free from chemicals, unrefined, and unbleached; sea salt.

I use a combination of about one-third corn meal and two-thirds pastry flour. The corn meal is for variety, texture, and flavor. If the corn texture is too primitive for your taste, cut down the amount or use only pastry flour.

Mix the flours in a bowl with a pinch of sea salt. If you insist on exact measurements, start with a cup of flour in total. Dribble two or three tablespoons of sesame or corn oil into the flour. Mix thoroughly until the oil has permeated the flour. Add a little cold water, dribbling it into the mixture gradually until the dough can be rolled into a ball. Set the ball aside for a half hour or so. Dust a wooden board with flour, get out your rolling pin (a clean beer bottle works well), and roll the dough until it is thin and flat. Shape it to a pie plate, trimming off excess, patching if necessary.

The combination toaster ovens are great for baking pie shells. Use a low heat and bake for a few minutes, then set aside to cool. If you have to use a stove oven, pre-heat to around 300 degrees; then bake the pie shell until it’s crisp and golden. Suggesting an exact amount of baking time is futile because every oven is different. Twenty minutes should do it at the outside. Try making individual pies occasionally; they’re easier and more attractive to serve.

I rarely use fresh fruit in pies and tarts. When you are lucky enough to find good fresh fruit in season, eat it that way. If you think you can’t enjoy strawberries without sugar, try this: Wash the strawberries leaving the stems on; add a teaspoon of sea salt to a pint of cold water; leave the strawberries in the cold salt water mixture for a half hour or so. Now taste. We all know what a little salt can do for an apple or a melon. Strawberries and raspberries perk up the same way.

One must look carefully to find canned peaches that aren’t prepared with heavily sugared syrup. Unsweetened peaches available at natural food stores make a spectacular pie. Pour the peaches and their natural juice into a Pyrex saucepan, add a little lemon peel — fresh or dried — and bring them to a simmer. Add arrowroot-water mixture to the peach juice. It will turn cloudy at first; when it bubbles and clears, pour the mixture into the pie shell and bake for a few minutes. If the pie is runny after it cools, add more arrowroot. If you want it sweeter, add chopped raisins or raisin water.

For a special topping on a fruit pie, take leftover pie crust, crumble it into a bowl that has a few tablespoons of wheat germ, roasted rolled oats, a little date sugar or honey, crushed sesame seeds, some coconut, a dribble of sesame oil, and a little water. Blend these ingredients and crumble the mixture on top of the pie filling. Brown under the broiler until the topping is golden brown.

Too many cooks ignore the potential of the root vegetables such as onions, pumpkins, and squash. Fragrant pie fillings from these vegetables are simple. Peel and slice onions into bite-sized slivers. Sauté slowly in sesame oil until soft and golden; add a little water. Simmer gently while you mix a tablespoonful of arrowroot powder with enough cold water to make a paste. When the paste is added to the onion-water mixture, it will turn cloudy. Keep stirring, over a low heat, until it bubbles and becomes clear. Then add a good jolt of tamari soy sauce.

It will take trial and error to find what suits your taste. After the filling is thoroughly mixed and bubbling, pour it into the prebaked pie shell. Return to the broiler for a few minutes until the filling bubbles, then remove from the oven. It is delicious at any temperature.

Furikake is a spectacular Japanese sesame condiment made of soybean puree, soy flour, nori (a dried sea vegetable), and Bonita (dried fish flakes). Add furikake before you add the arrowroot mixture and soy sauce, or after, or just before baking. If you can’t find furikake, dust the top of the pie with roasted sesame seeds before baking.

Turnips or parsnips, sliced and sautéed with onion, make delicious pies. The variations are endless. The important thing to remember is that handling root vegetables this way brings out their natural sweetness. Leeks, scallions, pumpkin, and squash can be used in combination with onions. Some need more sautéeing than others. Experiment.

A crepe, as we all know, is nothing but a delicate pancake. Crepe Suzette are thin pancakes with a filling added. The crepe is simple to make and delicious. I use whole wheat pastry flour. Sometimes I add fine corn meal for texture and variety. Mix the flour in a bowl with a pinch of sea salt. Add two or three tablespoons of sesame oil per cup. Blend thoroughly. Add raw milk, sour milk, sour cream, and water, or just plain water. Add an egg if you wish; for a large batch, add two. The milk and the eggs are good on occasion but not crucial. Keep adding liquid until the batter is thin but not runny. The thinner the batter, the thinner the crepe. A heavy batter makes a thick crepe. Suit yourself. The ideal utensil for making crepes is a light, French crepe pan. But any kind of pan or griddle will do. Simply pour your batter onto a hot griddle that has a light coating of sesame or corn oil. Let it cook until the top of the crepe is completely dry. Say a prayer or two before poking the edge of the spatula around the edge of the crepe. When the time comes, flip it over. The French jiggle the pan while the crepe is cooking over the flame then flip it over without the spatula. The huge Brittany buckwheat crepes sold on the Paris streets are too huge to be flipped without an instrument. (Sometimes they measure 18 inches across, the size of an East Indian roti.) When the crepe has cooked through on both sides, flip it onto a plate.

For a dessert crepe, the variety of fillings is infinite: Natural, unsweetened apple butter; apple, chestnut, and raisin mixture; thickened raisin water — chopped raisins stewed in water — with arrowroot for a raisin syrup; or stewed apricots, dried currants, and lemon peel blended together. Just spoon your favorite mixture onto the crepe, fold or roll them and serve.

Shelled walnuts lightly dusted with sea salt, freshly roasted over a low heat, and served warm make an incomparable snack or dessert. Most everyone appreciates the difference in taste between roasted and unroasted peanuts, but for some reason, the walnut is often presented as a soggy decoration or fresh from the nutcracker. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried walnuts fresh roasted and warm.

Other familiar nuts like the cashew or filbert may be served the same way. Store-bought nuts are usually pre-roasted in oil, often too much poor-quality salt is used; sometimes sugar and chemical preservatives are used to prevent nuts from turning rancid. The trick is to find nuts that have been grown, harvested, and stored without chemicals.

Shelled almonds with their natural membrane lend themselves to a Japanese treatment. Pour almonds into a glass bowl, then dribble tamari soy sauce over them. (The quality of the soy sauce is all-important.) Stir the nuts in the soy sauce until well coated; the membrane will absorb the liquid. Then arrange in a Pyrex dish. I use a slotted spoon or a fork so that the excess soy sauce can be saved for future use. Put the almonds under the broiler at a low heat, 200 degrees or less. Watch carefully and turn them over every few minutes. It usually takes ten to twenty minutes until the nuts are crisp enough to serve.

Warm chestnuts, freshly pan-roasted in their slashed shells, are a familiar seasonal delicacy sold on the streets of Paris and other cosmopolitan cities. Dried chestnuts can be stored and kept indefinitely. Chestnut flour or chestnut meal is fragile and should be used freshly ground. The chestnut has a natural sweetness. It combines beautifully with apples and raisins for tarts, pies, or compotes. Chestnut flour can be used with whole wheat pastry flour in crepes, waffles, chapati, or donuts.

When you blend a little daring, imagination, and quality ingredients, the results are delicious, sugar-free, natural foods. Once you decide to make this transition, you’ll be trimmer and healthier, more mentally alert, and free of the sugar blues.