November 2023
I grew up with condensed milk till my early adolescent years. In Sri Lanka, home for the first 10 years of my life, I got my hit mainly from condensed milk sweetened tea. There was also the condensed milk sandwich, two slices of well buttered white bread with condensed milk as the filling. Best of all though, was stealing a suck or two via the hole in the top of the can.
In Australia I continued my engagement with it in those three established ways and added a couple of new ones. First was swapping the bread for two SAO biscuits which gave the added pleasure of squeezing condensed milk worms through the tiny holes in the biscuit’s surface. The second came courtesy of the Australian Army in which my dad served all but one year of his pre-retirement work life. He would go off at times on ’bush’ camp or other army business and return with some of his rations, usually tubes of raspberry or strawberry jam, vegemite, and condensed milk to be squeeze-sucked.[2] My mum also occasionally converted the milk into caramel sauce by submerging the unopened can in boiling water for a couple of hours.
We broke up, condensed milk and I, when I gave up sweetened milk tea in early adolescence. I recently encountered it anew as an ingredient in two salad dressings in the 1952 reprint of The Commonsense Cookery Book compiled by the New South Wales Public School Cookery Teachers Association.
