Hi, I'm Vera
Welcome to Old World Reset. I am Vera, and I bake the way my grandmother did - with honey, dates and fruit doing the sweet work, and not one spoon of white sugar. Everything here is a recipe I have actually made in my own kitchen.
A kitchen, a grandmother, and no sugar bowl
I grew up in a village kitchen where the sugar bowl was almost always empty, not because anyone was being careful, but because there was rarely sugar to put in it. What we had was honey from the hives at the edge of the garden, dates when someone came back from the market, apples from the tree, and whatever the summer had left us in jars. The sweets I remember from childhood were built out of those things.
Why I started writing them down
When I came to America I found dessert had become something else. Everything was sweeter than it needed to be, and half of it came out of a box. So I started cooking the old ones again, one at a time, measuring properly as I went and writing each one down. That is all this is: the recipes I make anyway, written down so you can make them too.
How I cook
Nothing here needs a special ingredient you have to order. No powders, no substitutes pretending to be sugar, nothing artificial. Real honey, real dates, real fruit, real butter. If a recipe needs a technique, I explain it plainly, because a recipe you cannot follow is not a recipe, it is a photograph.
Come say hello
I post new recipes here every week, and I am on social most days.
The cookbook
101 dessert recipes with no refined sugar, ever. If you would like all of it in one place, organised and printable, that is what the book is for.