As far as I know, Chengdu morning and evening temperature difference is not very big, since July the weather station issued the first yellow warning of high temperature in history, this " came to not want to go ...... road place ", the night should not be anyone willing to go to the air conditioning can not control the street on the street.
But I was still taken by this friend to walk the streets - "sauna" days from the wide and narrow alleys have been walking around the corner to the Quixinglou Street.
Finally, in the middle of a row of restaurants, she pointed to one of the skewer stores and said they had ice noodles.
Uh-huh.
The first time I saw her, she pointed to one of the kebab shops.
Ice powder was originally a long-established summer snack here, made from simple, low-cost ingredients.
Shaped like colorless jelly, accompanied by the right amount of sugar water and hawthorn raisins peanuts, etc., but not excessively sweet; a large spoonful of crushed ice to give it the inner strength to infuse, not stimulate the cool.
Although in reality, in the steamy days of summer nights, Chengdu street skewer stores have begun to use A4 paper to simply and roughly printed on the words "ice powder", "cold cake" and so on, pasted to the store door.
Inform the public that the store now has an additional edible category, it is suitable for you to order after dinner, the air-conditioning to rub ten minutes more, so as not to embarrass each other and the boss, no thank you.
However, that's never been the case for my friend here, and it's never been the case for most locals.
" Ice powder can't be just a dessert," she told me seriously, "Have you ever eaten the dish of tiger peppers? How can the green peppers be just a seasoning in the tiger peppers?"
You drive 40 kilometers from Chengdu's main city to Xinjin County for a bowl of real, authentic ice powder at the temporary flower and bird market on Fuxing Street.
Sichuan people eat not by hunger, but by craving.
In this affluent place, where countless world-famous dishes have been born, the local people's diet has been upgraded long before the outsiders.
There are probably few places in the world where desserts can be made into street "ghost diets", the kind of late-night home, dry and dry, in the street by the trolley, a drink of ice cold and long.
That said, sitting in the kebab store, I greeted the crystal clear ice powder on the table with my eyes, a mouthful of ice smooth, a mouthful of sweetness and greasiness.
I couldn't help but exclaim, "Awesome!"
I can't help but exclaim, "That's awesome!", revealing the northern accent I've acquired from living in Beijing for a long time.
I didn't expect my friend to listen to me and immediately show an expression of " even this ice powder you think is delicious", his face is full of pity for the foreign diners who have never seen Sichuan cuisine.
I vaguely realized that this pity comes from a kind of food contempt chain that only Sichuan people understand.
This chain of contempt goes all the way up to the peak of the ice powder's oral pleasure.
The beauty of ice powder, in the eyes of the ice powder amateur, lies in the vague possibilities it offers.
The layman will probably never get the chance to know what it tastes like in its own right, even if it doesn't matter to them what the ice powder itself tastes like.
In their view, the ice powder itself is only responsible for the dessert's touch, like a medium, the ice cool, sugar sweet, fruit smooth wrapped together.
It's like when you're 20 years old and you first come to a cheap bar on Fall Street outside your college door, and you ask for a $20 glass of Long Island Iced Tea.
You cared only about the cheap alcohol, and couldn't even taste whether the base spirit was Niubanshan Erguotou or Smirnoff vodka.
If your understanding of Sichuan ice powder is only at this level, it's still too young.
Based on this misunderstanding of foreign diners, in recent years, the city of Chengdu has seen a variety of strange combinations of ice powder with taro ball, coconut, condensed milk, mango and other noisy guests.
Ah Hey, you take the ice powder as Yang Zhi Manna conscience does not hurt?
A bowl of certified icy noodles in the eyes of the locals is bound to have noble bubbles and some very slight flocculent suspension.
You'll find it surprisingly slightly sour, with a thick texture and a friendly tonkatsu, like young Jell-O - and this is when you know why Chengdu people always say that " hand-rubbing" is irreplaceable for icy noodles.
The "hand rubbing" refers to the use of a clean handkerchief or gauze to the ice powder raw material "ice powder seed seeds" wrapped in the appropriate amount of cold white water and repeatedly rubbed, and so the slippery liquid filled with it.
Take out the handkerchief package, and then add a little lime water and so on, to be it solidified, natural raw materials, handmade, noble origin, overnight that is melting ice powder on the street.
This process is full of slow philosophy and fast flavor, the ingredients are unknown simple and careful - peanuts and melon seeds should be crispy and crunchy can not be damp, hawthorn slices of raisins and orange peel sugar mash into the sugar water is still in the comfortable sweetness.
Those ice powder eaten by outsiders, 99% of them are unflavored pudding blended with powder. The smooth, firm cut of each spoonful is a disgrace to the ice-powder world.
You can mix pineapple, strawberry, mint, apple, it is not the taste and touch of summer in the past time.
Before I left Chengdu, I pestered my friend to take me to another ice noodle store.
This time, it was an unassuming but crowded store specializing in ice powder, with young people sitting on plastic stools playing with their cell phones while scooping up ice powder, and two takeaway boys at the front of the store urging the busy shopkeepers on and on.
As an outsider who doesn't understand the beauty of ice cream, my arrival caused sideways glances from diners and shopkeepers alike:
They've long since carved out their own places in the tiny ice cream universe of Chengdu's streets, and any unfamiliar visitor to the city is, in their eyes, an altered and destructive perturbation.
After a couple of bites, someone else walks in.
The man who came in spoke with a northern accent and stood slightly on tiptoe to politely pass through the diners sitting on small benches, looking at the menu hanging on the wall.
After a long time he finally opened his mouth and asked in standard Mandarin, "Excuse me, boss, what's the difference between this ice noodle and cold cake?"
The boss actually rolled his eyes at the questioner in full view of everyone.
" In Chengdu, it's not summer until you've had ice powder", said my friend.
I asked, "And it has to be hand-rolled or it doesn't deserve to be a Chengdu summer essential ?"
She thought about it, and told me that her vocabulary was now particularly scarce, and her emotional granularity dull and clumsy.
And couldn't find the words to accurately describe the blissful summer evening walks to the ice cream stand with her family when she was a toddler, or how to summarize the whispers of the ice cream that went down on her early love dates.
In middle age, a spoonful of ice cream slid down the throat, leaving a little coolness, only to feel that the world can no longer have such an unreal and real happiness that can be swallowed in one big gulp.