“It’s the best red bean ice cream I’ve ever had.”
Name your favorite ice cream. It’s okay; you can take a few minutes to think about it. For some people, the answer comes down to an exact brand, flavor, or type: the Klondike bar, Häagen-Dazs’ Chocolate Covered Vanilla Ice Cream Bar, or maybe just a good old tub of Blue Bell’s Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream. For my grandma, the answer is always Kang Le’s Red Bean Ice Cream Bar (康乐小豆冰柜.)
While not common in the United States, the red bean flavor is a stable of makeshift ice cream stands along the streets of China. With its origin dating back to more than 70 years, the red bean ice cream bar is made with crushed red beans, sugar, and water. The Kang Le brand started to make its mark in the ice cream business nearly 50 years ago in one of the more affluent neighborhoods of Tianjin. Kang Le’s ice cream bars would cost more than 10 or 20 cents, making them rather expensive compared to the average 5 or 6 cents ice cream bars at the time. Although no longer considered high-class or expensive today, the Kang Le brand is still well known and loved. One Red Bean Ice Cream Bar now is only 2 RMB (the equivalent of about 30 cents.) People young or old, ice cream lovers or not, know it as one of the most traditional and older names in Chinese ice cream history.
One afternoon, a few days before my grandma’s departure back to the United States, she asked me to accompany her to Quanyechang Shopping Street. I expected a request to buy some last minute socks or jackets, but she told me, “no, we’re going to buy some ice cream.” She searched in the dusty back cabinets for a cold insulating container, and we swiftly boarded the buses to Kang Le’s store located in the midst of the busy shopping district.
Kang Le’s store was small and basic, but there was a steady stream of people approaching the window and walking away with ice cream bars in red packets. My grandma walked up to the window, handed the employee the container we had brought from home, and asked her to stuff as many ice cream bars as she could into the container.
Later that day, I asked my grandma why she loved Kang Le’s Red Bean Ice Cream Bar so much. “It’s the best red bean ice cream I’ve ever had,” she replied, biting into one of the bars slowly. She had gotten new dentures the day before and had trouble with hard foods. “It reminds me of when I was younger. The flavor hasn’t changed in all these years.”
Article written by Ruoxi Yu.
