Sugar
America and sugar go together like apple pie and ice cream; you can’t imagine the food landscape of the US without it. And while Britain has its own sugar addictions, sweetness permeates savoury dishes here in a way that makes it feel all-encompassing. Think syrup on chicken and waffles, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving.
I’ve always had more of a savoury tooth and my food bucket list is heavily weighted towards salty rather than sweet, but avoiding sugar here is pretty difficult… as I found out when I first had breakfast in my apartment. My go-to option in the UK was peanut butter on wholemeal toast, but when I tried to recreate that in New York, I could actually taste the sugar in the bread and, when I checked, it was the third ingredient on the packet. So I decided to give in to the sugar for a couple of weeks, sampling some of the sweet offerings of the city to see what all the fuss is about…
Some food history
At the risk of getting too tangential and political too early… it’s hard to discuss sugar in the US (and, in fact, in the UK) without being reminded of its darker past; it was one of the most significant and lucrative crops in the Americas, and one that relied heavily on slavery. And while that relationship has since changed, it continues to have a symbiotic (though shifting) relationship with wealth. Due to its scarcity, sugar was originally a luxury and a status symbol (there’s a fascinating description in this Smithsonian article about how one of the indications of a colonial skeleton’s wealth was the extent of the decay of her teeth: “she’d lost 20, and several others had decayed down to the root stubs”).
Since then, of course, sugar has become hugely abundant and affordable, and individual consumption has skyrocketed. Linked to the high prices of groceries I was lamenting in the last post, fresh (i.e. healthy) produce feels particularly expensive in the US; it would be (much) cheaper to buy a family-sized bag of Oreos than a bag of satsumas in my local grocery store. Not that I’ve ever weighed up that choice of course. Walking down a cereal aisle here you’re confronted with names like “lucky charms”, “fruit loops” and “kix”; they symbolise contemporary sugar as cheap, cheerful and accessible. So what is the next step for sugar in the US?
Milk Bar
I first heard about Milk Bar when its founder, Christina Tosi, was featured on Netflix’s Chef’s Table. Formerly a pastry chef, she combined her technical skills and her immensely sweet tooth and applied them to American favourites, coming up with playful twists on the originals. As Milk Bar’s website says, they’re “known for colouring outside the lines and turning dessert on its head”. One of their signature offerings is cereal milk soft serve ice cream, made by infusing milk with cornflakes to come up with a more refined imagining of the leftovers at the bottom of your cereal bowl. It’s delicious and nostalgic, and comes with toppings including chunks of cereal that add a welcome crunch.
Other Milk Bar signatures include “crack pie”, a brown sugar and oat cookie pie that apparently came about as a fortuitous accident when Tosi was trying to use up store cupboard ingredients. This is sold in small slices at Milk Bar, presumably to stop you overdosing on the sugar. It was nice in the way that eating a whole sugar cube would be nice, but somewhat unnecessary (I wouldn’t rush to have more). The cookies are also a major seller with concoctions including cornflake and marshmallow or blueberry and cream. I had their “compost” cookie, a mix of (wait for it): pretzels, potato chips, coffee, oats, graham crackers, butterscotch and chocolate chips … again, this was delicious in the way that lots of sweet things mixed together should be.
It feels like Milk Bar has pioneered this next step in US sugar; it’s harnessed heavily processed sweetness, playing around with it to make it feel like a more middle class status symbol again. Yes, it’s pretty good value but it’s unmistakably a “trend” that is inherently more elite than what’s in your local supermarket. This felt particularly apparent when I went past a branch of Kith, a “lifestyle brand” (I’m not sure what that means) that has a treats department that specialises in breakfast cereal concoctions. Their ice cream swirl pots were $11 (!) I had one with hazelnut cream cereal and a Nutella drizzle. It was obviously delicious but I don’t know how you can justify that cost (well, presumably because people like me find it hard to walk by).
In the interests of full disclosure, I also tried one of Milk Bar’s signature savoury items: its bagel bomb, which is essentially a ball of bagel dough stuffed with scallion cream cheese and bacon. Salty, smoky and fatty, it was far tastier than anything else I tried there… I will definitely go back, but probably only for one of those.
