Caramel Milk

History

Dulce de leche is one of the simplest sweets in Latin America and one of the most argued-over: at heart it is nothing but milk and sugar simmered slowly together until the mixture thickens and turns a rich golden-brown. Under different names the same idea runs the length of the Spanish-speaking Americas — manjar and manjar blanco in Peru, Chile, and Bolivia, arequipe in Colombia, leche quemada elsewhere, doce de leite in Brazil — and the terms are used loosely enough that cooks in one country will call by one name what a neighbor calls by another.

Where it comes from is genuinely contested. The best-known Argentine story dates its "invention" to 1829, in the household of the caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, where a distracted servant is said to have left a pan of milk and sugar on the fire until it overcooked into a caramel cream — but this is told as a legend, not a record, and the same dish is also claimed, apocryphally, for figures like Napoleon and for far older kitchens in Indonesia, the Philippines, or India. Set against those tales is a plainer lineage: manjar blanco itself was a medieval European sweet, a blancmange of milk or almond milk, sugar, and often rice — even shredded chicken or fish — probably shaped by the Arab cuisine of Muslim Spain, and it crossed to the Americas with the colonists. The Andean habit of slowly reducing pure milk with sugar grew within that tradition. So the caramelized-milk sweet is best understood not as any one country's invention but as a family of preparations old and widespread enough that its beginnings are disputed — the rivalry live enough that when Argentina moved in 2003 to claim dulce de leche as national heritage, other South and Central American countries objected.

The recipe Gorriti prints as Leche Caramelo is a cousin of this family rather than a plain dulce de leche. Matilde Weigel de Puch, writing from Buenos Aires, opens the classic way — a liter and a half of milk cooked down with two and a half pounds of sugar — but she thickens it with wheat starch, binds it with eighteen egg yolks, scents it with cinnamon and pressed coconut milk (cocada), and finishes not by reducing the whole to a spread but by pouring it flat, dusting the surface with sifted sugar, and searing it with a red-hot iron to caramelize the top. The result is closer to a set, torched milk custard than to the slow-boiled dulce de leche, though the caramel note that gives it its name comes from that seared crust. Her page records only her name and her city; it says nothing of where the recipe came from or why she gave it that coconut-and-iron finish, and it makes none of the origin claims that later attached themselves to dulce de leche.

Ingredients

• 1.5 L milk
• 2.5 lb sugar
• 4 oz starch (almidón)
• 18 egg yolks, half-beaten
• 1 tbsp cinnamon
• 6 oz coconut, made into cocada (coconut milk-paste)
• 2 drops lemon essence
• ground sugar (for the caramel top)

Instructions

1. Cook milk with sugar and starch, stirring constantly, until thick.
2. Off heat, add eighteen half-beaten yolks and cinnamon; return and boil to set the egg.
3. Extract coconut milk (cocada) from ground coconut and stir it in off the heat, with lemon essence.
4. Pour into a flat dish, cool, dust with sugar, and caramelize with a hot iron.