Olivers wrote:
>
> Arri London muttered....
>
>
> >
> > Ah but that's a feature of much American cooking to us foreigners.
> > There is a pervasive sweetness in things that weren't sweet at 'home'.
> >
>
> a collateral track...
>
> My father's mother, orphaned as a child and raised on a hardscrabble West
> Texas ranch near Buffalo Gap aspired to some gentility and the props and
> affectations of same in her old age. After my grandfather's death, she
> kept her house, and in the 7th and 8th grades I walked two blocks from
> school three days a week to lunch with her.

That's nice! Lucky you.
>
> For the first few weeks, lunch always includedd "store bought" light bread.
> I had a heck of a time convincing her that I would be more'n happy with
> biscuits and even happier with cornbread, especially the "hot water" sort,
> "fried", at which she excelled. She had served light bread because she
> truly believed in indicated a higher social status or level of
> sophistication.

She was hardly alone at that time.
When I was growing up in Holland, 'white bread' was party bread or
special occasion bread.
>
> Back in the early 50s, produce was still seasonal, and many of the meals
> would have been classed as vegetarian except for the standard additions of
> "side meat" to the cooking process. In this climate, the hardier greens
> are available well into the Winter, but dried bean season starts in October
> and runs thru April or so. Except for canned tomatoes, I don't remember
> ever having a store bought canned vegetable except for beets (always a
> "salad"). I still buy "real" hominy, the dried sort, attempting to recrate
> the miracles she could perform with a food most popular those who couldn't
> afford cornmeal.

Although I was born later, the same was true in Europe. We didn't grow
up with much in the way of canned vegetables (which often came in glass
jars anyway).
>
> Having white sugar, brown sugar, molasses and sorghum syrp available and
> affordable had given her a sweet toooth in later years, souvenir of a
> sugar-deprived childhood, and sweeteners were in many of her recipes,
> especially for yeast rolls, which put me off them for years.
>
> TMO

It was hard to get used to when I had to move to the US as an adult. As
a kid, my parents avoided those sorts of things when we were in the US.
My mother, who has lived in the US longer than I have, certainly has
picked up a sweet tooth.

When I follow most American baked goods recipes, I cut the sugar by
about half unless it's truly essential to the structure. Strangely
enough, everyone eats the stuff I bake anyway and asks for more. They
don't seem to miss the sugar, despite normally eating much more of it.