Chewy and sweet milk caramel can be made in minutes

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In India, milk is simmered for hours until only the dense, nutty-flavored solids remain. They are mixed with sugar and spices, such as cardamom and saffron, to make burfi, a category of sweets whose garnishes may include pistachios and strips of silver leaf. Unlike dulce de leche, in which the milk is cooked with sugar until golden brown, the milk stays white here (burfi comes from the Persian word for snow) for a purer flavor.

Knead and shape, sprinkle the treats with sugar and voila, you can eat them right away.

So too in the Philippines, where these lunar candies are known as milk pills. Although the name is Spanish, a legacy of more than three centuries of colonialism, there seems to be no precedent in Spanish food. (The archipelago is home to around 180 languages, and Filipinos switch freely between one and the other, dubbing English and Spanish at will, sometimes all in the same sentence.) Pill is the shape, like a pill; Leche is milk, originating from the carabao (water buffalo) that tilled the fields in San Miguel, a town in the province of Bulacan, north of Manila.

Cooking milk is time consuming and requires vigilance. Abi Balingit, whose cookbook, “Mayumu” (“sweet” in Kapampangan, an important language in the Philippines), was published in February, offers a beautifully simple, no-bake shortcut: Sift together the dry whole milk and salt, then mix condensed milk to form a dough. Knead and shape, sprinkle the treats with sugar and voila, no waiting; you can eat them right away.

Balingit, 28, began posting recipes on her blog. the dark kitchen in the summer of 2020 as a way to deal with the isolation of the pandemic and his separation from his family in the Bay Area. (She grew up there and now lives in Brooklyn.) The title of the blog was a nod to both the low light in her apartment (the little sun that reaches the kitchen comes from the only window in the living room) and the only time she was able to bake: she and her three companions Fourth graders were working from home, putting laptops in the corners, and the walls were too thin for her to use the stand mixer without interrupting everyone’s attention. “I was zooming all day, baking all night,” she says.