Gail Borden took a Lac(tic Acid) and gave his mother sweetend condensed milk

Saucetastic, What exactly is sweetened condensed milk, you know the stuff you put in pumpkin pies and what is a better substitute for it milk, ½ & ½ or cream? – Canned

Here is an example of truth in advertising; sweetened condensed milk is just that. Milk is placed in a vacuum (lowering the boiling point) and water is removed from the milk until the volume is reduced by half. This is also how evaporated milk is made – the difference between the two products is evaporated milk is homogenized, sterilized and canned at this point.

Sweetened condensed milk is well, sweetened. A lot of sweetening, sugar is added until the product is about ½ sugar – sweetened is the first word of its name. Heating, even at the low temperatures between 110-140º ƒ (41-50 C), changes the flavor of the milk, evaporated milk can taste a little off; scorched, burnt, curdled - rather than disguising it, adding sugar actually enhances this taste, making the flavor a more palatable - caramel and butterscotchy. That and the high sugar content retards microbial growth.

Both sweetened condensed and evaporated milk are old products. Gail Borden began experimenting with canning milk as early as 1852; going on to make a fortune supplying the Union Army with canned milk and rations during the Civil War. Shortly after the war in 1866, Borden was selling 300,000 gallons of his Eagle Brand Milk a year, the product’s popularity certainly didn’t grow from being an army ration.

Milk has a halo of purity but prior to railroads and industrialization; the advent of the milk carton and pasteurization; the pastoral/Little House on the Prairie image of Pa milkin’ Bessie is a far nicer thought than how milk was produced for urban markets. Before it was a business school concept, the ‘dairy industry’ was vertically integrated with the brewing industry: Cows were kept in urban lots to eat the discarded mash of brewers. Milk and beer were often distributed together and while beer was heated, killing microbes, milk had no such fortune. Animals were kept and milked in unsanitary conditions; milk was packaged without sterilization or pasteurization and distributed without refrigeration. Milk was dangerous, the supply line from udder to customer was the definition of cross contamination and that is when you could get milk, actual milk. These were days before purity laws and government monitoring, so a product labeled milk could have been adulterated with chalk, talc, molasses and flour or other fillers.

Shelf stable milk, even from a can, was an improvement over what was available to most consumers. Travelers who enjoy slightly exotic locales probably understand this a little better than most – milk from a can in southern Mexico or Southeast Asia is the safest option for coffee. In the States, evaporated and sweetened condensed milk remained popular until its peak consumption year in 1945.

Even though consumption has declined by half since 1980, sweetened condensed milk is still popular in cooking and baking. Besides being listed as an ingredient in the pie recipe on the back of a can of pumpkin, it makes a quick and easy flan/caramel custard – sweetened condensed milk caramelizes at a temperature below boiling. Many people peel the label off, simmer the can in water, let it cool and decant a crème caramel – Quick and easy, unless there is air trapped in the can in which case the ensuing explosion will be hard to clean, if it doesn’t cause a trip to the ER.

As far as pumpkin pie goes, although sweetened condensed milk’s fat content is closer to ½ & ½, substitute an equal amount of cream in your pie recipe, the consistency of the pie will stay the same and your pie will be less sweet filling and a far better tasting.