Sand ice is the most delicate ice. Generally, it should be mixed with fruits and delicious raw materials, broken and eaten through a straw, which feels like drinking a drink.
A little thicker is shaved ice with a whole block of ice planer. The taste of the ice is like frozen cotton, but it has chews. Generally, it will be drenched with some thick sauce, such as caramel, red bean paste or peanut paste and sesame paste, which can really experience the soft taste of shaved ice and also have a relative taste.
The crudest is crushed ice, which can be used for chewing, because the particles are thick, and it can be chewed with beans or bean jelly. Relatively speaking, the flavor source of crushed ice mainly depends on the seemingly monotonous syrup or coke syrup and condensed milk, because eating crushed ice is mainly to eat its full energy and lead to "biting addiction".
Shaved ice has a long history in China.
China people have a long tradition of eating iced food.
Due to the long history of ice storage industry, in the Tang and Song Dynasties, especially in the Song Dynasty, both the royal and folk ice storage activities were extremely large. In summer, a large amount of ice and snow could be taken out from icehouse for use, and the folk ice and snow trading was more active, which of course promoted the development and popularization of ice food.
There are two main ways for people in the Tang and Song Dynasties to directly import ice and snow. One is cold water, that is, cold drinks, and the other is broken into small pieces of ice or unmelted snow, which is ice food, which is equivalent to shaved ice today.
In the Song Dynasty, cold drinks made of ice and snow were quite common, not a rarity at all, at least in Beijing.
In the History of Song Dynasty, it is stipulated that "servants shoot, ancient advisers, honest officials, frugal officials, stay behind, observe, save envoys at home, and have the right to know how to open the government". At this level, the emperor should get some special rewards at four o'clock and eight days, among which "honey sand ice" should be given on the day of Furi.
Sand refers to "bean paste", Dream of Tokyo and other notes in the Song Dynasty all refer to "Chengsha dumplings" sold in the market, Dream of Liang Record refers to "sand dumplings" and "musk bean paste dumplings", and Old Stories of Wulin refers to "bean paste stuffing", which shows that bean paste is very common in the Song Dynasty.
Presumably, "honey sand ice" is ice poured with honey and bean paste, which is shaved ice.
There is also a kind of "lactose snow", which sprinkles condensed milk on crushed ice, which is simply a modern version of "ice cream".