Today, I’d like to write about sugar.

This is going to be a long post, but I have the time to write, and maybe you have time to read. I’m doing this while I’m home from work, sick with a strange fever. It’s high enough to prompt skipping out on the day job, but too low-grade to stay in bed and do nothing. Los Angeles is an unforgiving furnace; maybe it’s the heat, coupled with how nothing makes you feel more like a five-year old than a fever, that’s making me write about my childhood and how it led me to the kitchen.

In many regions in the Philippines, kalamay is usually a sticky, sweet rice cake. But in Ilonggo, the dialect I grew up with, it is our word for SUGAR. It’s the baking ingredient that’s closest to my heart. Much of it has to do with growing up on a sugar mill; my family lived in the Victorias Milling Co. compound in Negros Occidental, Philippines for close to 19 years.

Back then, if the constant talk of sugar around town–growing it, harvesting it, making it, selling it–wasn’t enough, the sight of the mill’s smokestacks in the distance or fields of green sugarcane waving in the sun just outside the gates of our house gave this curly girl enough sweet memories to last her a lifetime.

Papa is an agriculturist by trade and sugarcane is his crop of choice. Even till today, I like having him tell the tale of how sugar is made, no matter how many times I’ve heard (or seen) it. The story of how those fine crystals are born is one of the most comforting ones of my childhood. I see it in my head today as clearly as I saw it happen then: how sun-kissed canes are fed into the molino’s big mouth on winding rail cars pulled by trains, how the stalks are crushed by big, giant rollers and how the juices from the pressing are cooked down to thick, dark-colored syrup. This then goes through a maddening whirl in a centrifuge to separate the solid matter (muscovado in some stages) from the liquid (molasses). The liquid part is used to feed cattle. Whatever solid particles are then refined, washed with food-grade chemicals (early washings produce “raw”, turbinado or demerara sugars), and refined again and again, until all that’s left is 99.9% pure, white table sugar.

In restaurants, Papa would take a sugar packet from the table and tear it open, pour a sugary fountain into his palm and feel how fine the granules were with his fingers. He could tell how good of a job the refinery did by the quality of the granules or the whiteness of the sugar itself. Sometimes, I still do this randomly in a restaurant, as much a force of habit as a need to keep my sugary memories of Victorias alive.

The smell of cooking sugar wafted throughout town day and night. Its notes were rich and heady, like how you’d imagine sugar would smell if you’ve left it too long to caramelize in the flanera as you’re making leche flan. As a very young girl, I used to hate it. It mingled with the smell of burning cane fields (they used to burn the organic matter that was left behind after hand-harvesting the cane.) The combination was a sickeningly sweet perfume that hung over everything. I felt like it clung to my skin, my clothes, my hair.

When I started baking at 12, it was partly out of boredom and partly because there was a lot of sugar to work with. Nobody really sat me down, put a wooden spoon in my hand, and said, “You’re going to bake as a hobby.” The mill was producing sugar at maximum capacity then, at one point supplying 60% of the country’s sugar needs. I once visited the main warehouse and saw mountains of white sugar so high they made my curly head spin. I thought to myself, if there’s so much of this, maybe I can do something with it. It sure beat making mudpies!

But, growing older, the need to bake took on a different meaning. I really got to know the people who made the mill run: the farmers, many of whom were honest folks who worked the earth (and worked it hard), the fathers and mothers who supported that industry in whatever way they could: as lab technicians, accountants, teachers, barbers, all of those genuine people who became characters in my storybook.

And I’ve never really told anyone this, but when I started to go to college and the Jesuits got to me (ha!), I realized the one reason why I wanted to bake: I wanted to make food–glorious, sweet, delicious food–that filled people’s eyes and mouths and stomachs and made them happy, so that the toil of those farmers I knew as a child could mean something much more than just stories of bad labor practices and greed in the sugar industry. Baking became my way of telling all my childhood characters: “Thank you for your life’s work. Allow me to attempt to honor it the best way I know how: by taking it and transforming it into a sweet gift for someone else.”

And, in retrospect, the story of sugar is quite like my own. With my many adventures in life, love and leaving Victorias, then Manila, and finally the Philippines, I feel like many times I’ve been wheeled into the unknown, broken down, cooked, spun, refined and refined again. These days, I’d like to think I’ve been refined as much as a girl with a curl can be.

The smell of sugar cooking as I bake is something I now welcome, even if it means I’ve been careless enough to have left it burning on the stovetop. It brings alive the magic of being a kid in Victorias. And for this, I will keep on baking. Which reminds me, this long post is done, I am home from work with nothing else to do, and somewhere in the kitchen, a jar of sugar is waiting for me.