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Some tasty dips and spreads are very useful when you’re eating a low-fat, low-sugar diet. They take the place of both cheese and butter in sandwiches and on toast, crispbreads and crostini, as well as making tasty first courses and additions to salads.

Many of the savoury dips in this section are based on beans or lentils which make wonderfully flavoursome dips and spreads, thick or thin, smooth or chunky as you prefer. Mix them with fresh herbs, spices, lemon juice, tomato paste, garlic, sweet peppers and other vegetables – there are many possibilities. Tofu, too – well-flavoured, of course – is excellent dip-and-spread material.

Sweet spreads – to replace honey, jam and even chocolate spread – require a little more ingenuity when sugar in any kind of serious quantity is out of bounds. As I’ve explained in the introduction to this book, I’ve taken the tough route and even banished fruit, which would be a relatively easy option for sweet spreads and of course there are plenty of no-added sugar preserves, sweetened with fruit juice, available if your diet is more lenient.

But for those who cannot bend the rules this far, I have found several useful sugar replacements: canned chestnut purée (unsweetened, of course); cooked and puréed butternut squash; carob powder, that so-called ‘chocolate replacement’ usually scorned by chocoholics but usually really appreciated by anyone on a diet which denies the real thing; and fruit teas which provide the flavour of fruit without the sugar.