Cooking with my grandma was one of the first things that taught me about love, patience and time. We could spend hours during my summer and winter breaks removing the grains of corncob one per one, opening each bean pod as a sort of meditation or using the mill to extract the juice to make arepas and envueltos. In contrast to my house in Bogotá where my mom would buy brand names for all sorts of goods’—cereal, milk, oatmeal, eggs,—my grandma still preferred to go to the plaza de mercado and to walk back home with the heavy bags, at the time we didn’t have a car. She would often spend that time talking about the development of the neighborhood, on how my uncles and dad had to walk down the hill to bring water in buckets back home to cook. 

    In her table you could always find a porcelain with its own lid to store the brown sugar. Same sugar she would use to prepare all sorts of desserts. Dulce de mora, dulce de durazno, dulce de papayuela, always a sweet of… and any fruit available. And every now ang then, against all my desires, she would make mielmesabe, a Colombian Style Curdled Milk dessert made with milk, lime and panela—a kind of unrefined cane sugar. Probably the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted, Miel-me-sabe or I-Can-Taste-Honey requires one thing many people of my generation lack: patience. Stirring for an hour with a wooden spoon means you can’t do anything else but give the pot your full attention to prevent it from burning. Panela’s porosity allows her to melt into the liquid without hardening, even if it forms a hard structure the sandy texture crumbles. The final result, very distant from the crystal transparency of the white sugar, remains opaque. When you work with sugar instead of only buying sweets, it’s possible to create a sort of dialog with it. Too hot and it burns, turning the pot black in a matter of minutes, too cold and it never melts. It’s a game of give and take. Finally, when some sort of agreement is met, it transforms. An elastic structure you can pull to create threads or a hard shell to cover and protect.