As anyone who has ever boiled milk has learned, milk traps steam as it is heated, and if the heating continues past a certain point, a small explosion occurs in the pan. The milk suddenly ‘foams up’, as the cookbooks say, and overflows the pan. In order to overcome this problem when reducing milk over high heat, one should start off with a sufficiently large pan so that even foaming will not overflow the sides. After a while, when the milk has reduced and thickened, it becomes necessary to lower the heat very far and to keep stirring, both to prevent scorching and to stir back any skin forming on the surface of the milk.
Middle Eastern cooks carry this process to its ultimate. They reduce rich water-buffalo milk to a white solid called eishta in Arabic (see kaymak). When full reduction is done in the presence of sugar, the result is a coffee-coloured, spreadable solid that plays a traditional role in Hispanic American desserts, especially in Argentina, under the name dulce de leche. In N. America, an informal, folk/industrial version of this dish has evolved: a can of sweetened condensed milk is completely submerged under boiling water until the sugar in it caramelizes and the milk solidifies.
In the Philippines, to the north of Manila, it is traditional to reduce the milk of the carabao, the local water-buffalo, to a quarter of its natural volume and then to cook it with sugar until the mixture, still white, reaches the soft ball stage. Then these pastillas de leche are rolled in sugar and wrapped in white paper.
Reduced milk sweets reach their zenith as a genre in India. But it is India, before all nations, that has experimented most completely with reduced milk. It is not an exaggeration to say that Indian cuisine contains within it a minicuisine evolved around the various stages of thickness that milk attains as its water evaporates, its proteins coagulate, and its natural sugars turn a gentle brown.
Milk is the major source of animal protein for the millions of vegetarian Indians and a basic component of the daily diet of most of the rest of India. Buffalo milk, yoghurt, cheese, and the clarified butter called ghee are universal in Indian food, and in their Indian versions, they have special qualities setting them off from their non-western analogues. The reduced milk dishes make up an even more special world.
Traditional slow boiling in an Indian kadhai (see wok cookery) is a lengthy process made much easier and quicker in the microwave, but the result is the same.
Milk reduced to a quarter of its original volume is a light beige, aromatic liquid called rabadi. Basoondi, a cream pudding dessert which is popular in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, is basically a sweetened rabadi with the addition of pistachios and almonds.
Rabadi reduced further, by half (to an eighth of the volume of the original whole milk), is a fudgelike solid called khoya. There are also many dishes where whole milk and a solid ingredient are cooked together until the milk is absorbed and almost vanishes, leaving behind a richness of texture and taste. One of the most unusual of these, showing the cosmopolitan side of Indian cuisine, is a spicy dish whose basic element is corn kernels cooked in milk until the milk ‘disappears’.
Rabadi, the thick but still pourable reduction, makes a rich sauce for desserts and fruit. A cheese precipitated from rabadi is the basis for the dessert cheese dumplings, Bengali Ras malai, and for the rich Indian ice cream kulfi. Rabadi rediluted with some regular milk is served as a beverage sweetened with sugar.
From solid khoya, Indians make a broad variety of fudges (barfi) flavoured with pistachio, cardamom, ground cashews, coconut, potato, ginger, mung beans, semolina, and pumpkin. Khoya is cooked with grated carrots to make a moist pudding called halva. The list could be extended because the Indian genius has applied the nutty richness of highly reduced milk to virtually every vegetable purée and flavouring. A particularly complex khoya dish is the pastry called Khoya poli, in which a thin, fried wholewheat puff (like the spherical bread called poori) is stuffed with a paste of khoya, grated coconut, sugar, sultanas, ground cardamom, chopped almonds, and rosewater.
Perhaps the furthest that khoya cookery gets from a plain glass of milk is in the Kashmiri mock meat dish Matar shufta. This is a vegetarian parody, as it were, of the ground meat and chickpea concoction called Keema matar. For Matar shufta, milk fudge grains are fried until they resemble ground meat.
Something like the same effect occurs in one of Italy's most celebrated dishes, Arrosto di maiale al latte, pork roast with milk, in which a boned pork loin is braised in milk. Eventually, the milk reduces to the equivalent of khoya, and then it cooks further, in the pork fat, until it browns in nutty, meatlike, and very delicious little flecks. No one will believe it began as milk—except perhaps an Indian guest willing to indulge in pork.
Raymond Sokolov of the Wall Street Journal is the author of many books including The Cook's Canon, Fading Feast, Why We Eat What We Eat, and With the Grain. (RSo)
