I was watching a friend make spaghetti sauce when she picked up a can and tipped it into the pot. Out came a thick, sticky stream of what looked suspiciously like… But could it be…?
“Wait! Stop!”
She stopped.
“Is that…?” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. “Is it…?”
“Condensed milk?” she finished for me. “Yeah.”
I was thinking: The world’s gone bonkers. “Since when did you put condensed milk in spaghetti?” I said.
Now it was her turn to be baffled. I might as well have caught her spiking brownies with weed.
“Why,” she finally said, “this is how I’ve always done it.”
Was I really that surprised? Honestly, yes. Should I have been? No. After all, Filipinos like their pasta (even pancit Canton) on the sweet side — sometimes cloyingly so. The sweetness has to come from one form of sugar or other, right? Condensed milk happens to be widely available, cheap, and, at anywhere from 45% to 65% sucrose, plenty sweet.
I myself prefer a hint of sweetness in my food, and will add sugar to any dish if I can get away with it. If I have any beef at all with sugar, it’s that it’s too sweet. I am not being sarcastic. As with salt, I tend to put in too much sugar, too soon. I try to remind myself to go easy at first, that I can always make up for lack of flavor later, but after that first dash I somehow think, Oh, surely a little more can’t hurt, can it? Guess what: it does.
Which brings me to something called coco sugar, made from the sap collected from the flowers of the coconut tree (the same stuff that’s made into vinegar and the native wine tuba/lambanog). My mother bought some when she could not find stevia, my juice sweetener of choice. “See how you like it,” she’d said.
And I really did. Wanted to like it, I mean. After all, it’s locally made and from coconut. The sugar itself looks like a powdered version of brown sugar, but supposedly loaded with vitamins and minerals, and boasts of a low glycemic index — thus “nature’s finest sweetener,” as it says on the box. And it might very well be, except for the fact that it’s not terribly sweet.
What does Wikipedia say? “Coconut sugar is subtly sweet, almost like brown sugar…” Excuse me, but that’s like saying that Tom Hanks is a subtle actor, almost like Adam Sandler! Actually, coco sugar is sweet; it’s just that the taste dissipates very quickly, unlike that of regular sugar, which is more rounded, lingers on the tongue, and then sort of blooms towards the palate. With coco sugar, one moment the taste is there, and then the next: gone. That’s not subtlety to me. Caramelly, yes; one-dimensional, maybe; subtle, no.
Quibbling aside, I can not recommend coco sugar highly enough, if only for cooking. It’s hard to go overboard with it precisely because it’s not that kind of sweet (making it unsuitable for beverages), and the fact that I have to tear open the sachet to get to the stuff gives me enough pause to derail my often absent-minded impulse to add more. To tell you the truth, I’m a little obsessed with it these days. Just the other night I had to fight the urge to add some to the fish tinola — you know, just to see how that would go. I would like to say that common sense prevailed. Actually, my father was watching.
But back to my friend’s spaghetti. It’s got hotdog, corned beef, Eden cheese, and as much ketchup as tomato sauce (maybe more). I love it. I did give her some coconut sugar to try. But just so we’re clear: when it comes to her spaghetti, condensed milk works just fine.
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