CONDENSADA

Condensada! The magical ingredient that unites Southeast Asia. Sweetened condensed milk is the key to Vietnamese coffee, Malaysian teh tarik and Thai ice tea. In the Philippines, it transformed the Spanish crème caramel into the denser, sweeter leche flan and the American canned fruit cocktail into the transcendental fruit salad. As you eat around the region, you can observe how condensada can be used to improve the taste of anything: shaved ice, oatmeal, chocolate pudding, strawberries, toast bread or even avocados (sorry to my Mexican friends).

The ubiquitous nature of condensed milk in Southeast Asia — and Latin America for that matter — is due to the difficulty of storing dairy products in a tropical climate. This all changed in 1856 when Gail Borden invented a way to preserve milk by heating it and adding a whole lot of sugar (aaaah, sugar!!!!). This miraculous product allowed us tropical folk to mimic simple colonial recipes, like the British tea with milk, which would then become the default teh in Singapore. (Important note: The ‘C’ in Teh C or Kopi C is not for condensada but for Carnation Evap).

Final footnote: Filipinos traditionally drank hot chocolate, rather than tea or coffee. Yet most chocolate eh, ah or sikwate recipes do not include condensed milk. It is not clear why it happened, especially why Filipinos — who even have spaghetti sauce recipes with condensed milk — decided to use the other beloved canned milk product: evap! — as the milk substitute for hot choco.