The Pleasure of Sweets

Summer time, a delicious ice cream would be great! But before you take a lick do you know who first invented ice cream? The answer is: the Chinese! Of course, the wonderful creation of this sweet food comes from China, as many Chinese will proudly tell you.

Once upon a time, let’s say three thousand years ago, in the Shang Dynasty, Chinese people knew how to store ice in winter for use in summer. In the Yuan Dynasty (around 1271, at the time of Emperor Khubilai Khan), clever businessmen also started putting honey and pearl powder into the ice in order to attract more customers. So this is how the first idea for ice cream took shape. In the 13th century, when the famous Italian world-traveller Marco Polo left China, Chinese ice cream production methods were brought to Italy, and from there spread to France and Britain. Marco Polo wrote in his journal, Record of Observations of the East: “In the golden country of far east (China), the residents like to eat milky ice.”

But let’s change the topic before we argue with each other: how many other kinds of food, including spaghetti, were invented by the Chinese?! Well, when it comes to sweet foods, you’ll probably find them in every nation. The most well-known sweet foods in Western countries are certainly puddings, or cakes that are made of flour, sugar, milk, butter and eggs, or other similar pastries. But in China, sweet foods include far more than that. Most important, besides candies, bonbons, sweets, and cakes, are a huge range of sweet soups. Cantonese call them tang shui (糖水, sugar water), and in other regions people call them tian tang (甜汤, sweet soups), or even more commonly tian pin (甜品, sweet products, desserts).

Cantonese sweet soups are generally juice-based, and also include porridge soups with beans, green beans, red beans. Or those with sweet potato, white fungus mushroom, ginkgo fruit with dried tofu, lotus seeds with egg, sesame paste, walnut paste, etc. What the mainlanders like are soups with fruits, taro or pumpkin, rice steamed with fruits, pot pie, and jelly tofu, etc.

Let’s go back to Marco Polo again, because an interesting thought just came to me. Should Chinese people actually thank him or hate him instead? While introducing Chinese culture, including its food culture, to the Western world, he also took lots of secret recipes with him! Nowadays everything that concerns patents, intellectual property and copyrights has become a sensitive issue in trade. If the ancient Chinese had found out about what Marco Polo did, what would they have made of it? I would probably then ask a further question: which country was richest a thousand years ago? Next!