03.27.08
Easy dulce de leche
Long ago, during her university year abroad in the Soviet Union, Jackie learned some kitchen survival skills that some time later served her well as a grad student living in a furnished room with minimal cooking facilities. Most weeks, she’d bake a couple of loaves of dense, flavorful, durable Russian-style bread and make an enormous pot of borscht based on cabbage, meaty bones and, of course, beets.
And for dessert? Something else she picked up in Leningrad, from her friend Irina: boiled cans of sweetened condensed milk. The word order is the recipe: “boiled cans” of milk. Remove the labels from the cans to pre-empt their coming off and disintegrating into an ugly mess. Place the unopened cans — yes, unopened — in a pot of boiling water, perhaps on top of a washcloth so that they don’t rattle. Cover the pot and simmer for two and a half or three hours, taking care to replenish the water as needed to keep the cans submerged: if it boils dry, the cans (I am told) can burst.
Why would you do this? Because the sugared milk somehow metamorphoses into a thick, glossy, very sweet substance of a rich coffee-and-cream color, a substance very much like a do-it-yourself version of dulce de leche. Once it has cooled, you can just eat it (in small quantities) with a spoon, which was Jackie’s preferred method. It smears nicely on plain cookies and is a dandy sundae ingredient. Also, as we’ve recently discovered, it is the key to making banoffee pie, which apparently was invented in 1972 at an English restaurant called The Hungry Monk.
It goes something like this: Line a fully baked pie crust with sliced, very ripe bananas and top them with a can or a bit more of this condensed milk stuff, then with whipped cream lightly flavored with instant coffee. Serve cold. If this sounds good to you, you’ll love it, as we do. If you think it sounds awful, give it a try anyway, though I make no promises.
Sorghum Crow said,
28 March 2008 at 10:55 am
Some one brought this to a program at our local library. Yummy!