Sweet on sweets

"Traditionally, all Indian desserts are made on top of a stove, whether steamed, simmered, boiled in syrup, toasted, panfried, or deep-fried, or sometimes a combination of all these techniques.

"The popular gulab jamun, for example, is a syrup-soaked fritter about the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Like so many Indian sweets, its ingredients are simple, essentially sugar and milk, but the recipe requires a great deal of precision, technique, and labor - again, like so many of the subcontinent's confections.

"The process begins by making mawa (also known as khoa or khaya), produced by cooking milk over a slow fire for hours to evaporate almost all of its moisture.

"Ideally the result should be fairly dry with a delicate golden color and a taste hinting of caramel. Mawa is used in numerous Indian desserts. (Some cookbook authors suggest substituting milk powder for the mawa, but then all the complexity is lost.)

"Once the mawa is ready, the cook mixes it with flour and more milk or cream, forms the batter into balls, then deep-fries them. Finally, they get a soak in syrup.

"The resulting gulab jamun is part doughnut, part baba rum with a pleasantly bitter edge from the twice-caramelized milk sugars. Most Americans find it too sweet. Indians adore it."

Michael Krondl, in "Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert"