With the cold season ready to roll in, the aroma of boiling stacks of sugar lumps is filling Tangail’s Kalihati upazila, 102 kilometres north of Dhaka city. The resultant dark, viscous liquid with a smoky flavour and dense sweetness is known as molasses or black treacle, whose demand spirals during winter. Molasses are an essential ingredient for winter delicacies called pitha. To make molasses, farmer press sugarcane stalks to extract juice, which is then boiled down until the sugars crystallise and precipitate out. The syrup left over after crystallisation is referred to as molasses. The photos were taken on Thursday.