the lacquered fruit skewers of the northern Chinese winter: hawthorns threaded on bamboo, dipped in sugar boiled to the hard crack, and set on a cold stone into a glass shell that shatters at the first bite
Origin: China
From the journey of Sugar Cane.
Bīngtáng húlú means ice-sugar gourd, the gourd being the silhouette a skewer of round fruits makes, and it is the emblematic winter street food of Beijing and the northern Chinese cities. The story attached to it is a Song dynasty one, in which a court physician cured a favourite concubine of the Shaozong emperor with hawthorns simmered in sugar, and the remedy passed from the palace into the street; the pairing is at any rate medically sensible, since Chinese medicine regards the hawthorn as a digestive and the fruit is fiercely sour without something to carry it. It belongs to the cold months for a practical reason: the sugar shell must set hard and stay hard, and in a warm damp room it goes sticky within minutes. The technique is pure sugar work, and it depends on the cane sugar that China has been refining since the Tang envoys brought the method back from India in 647 CE. Vendors carry the skewers stuck into a straw-bound pole, and though hawthorn is the original and the standard, the same treatment is given to tangerine segments, grapes, strawberries, and small tomatoes. The pleasure of it is entirely textural: a brittle, almost weightless glass of sugar giving way to a fruit sour enough to justify it.
Chinese hawthorns are sold frozen by Chinese grocers in the winter months and are the authentic fruit; their extreme sourness is what the sugar exists to balance, and any substitute should be chosen on the same principle, so firm strawberries and tangerine segments work far better than sweet grapes. A tablespoon of glucose syrup or a teaspoon of white vinegar added with the sugar makes the syrup more forgiving and less prone to crystallising, at the cost of a very slightly softer shell. Boiling sugar at 155°C causes severe burns; keep children away from the pan, and never attempt to taste the syrup with a finger. The northern street version is often made with the hawthorns cored and stuffed with red bean paste or a walnut half before dipping.
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