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A friend told our columnist never to write about this easy Hawaii-style sherbet. Lucky for you, she did anyway.
So few childhood treats stand the test of time.
One night in college, it occurred to me that, far from home, no one was going to tell me what I could and couldn’t eat, so I stalked the aisles of the Wawa at the edge of campus until I found a packet of Hostess HoHos, those little chocolate cake rolls with ghost-white swirls of cream. A bite, and — ashes. All delight was gone. It felt as if I’d been booted out of the kingdom; there would be only the gravity of grown-up tastes now.
But not everything has been taken from me. I still thrill to the Icee, that brain-chilling slush of soda invented in the 1950s by Omar Knedlik, who owned a Dairy Queen franchise in Kansas and, as legend has it, stashed soda in the freezer when the soda fountain was on the blink. He later patented a machine that cools soda to exactly 28 degrees Fahrenheit, to achieve that suspended state between ice and cream.
For me, the only Icee is the one that Kon Ping Young — Mr. Young to me — used to make at the Crack Seed Store in Honolulu, where I grew up, in what people in Hawaii call small-kid time. The base was always strawberry, the rosy slush whorling down into the cup. Halfway through, Mr. Young would stop the machine and spoon in the liquid skimmed off a jar of li hing mui, a local snack of preserved plums soused on a brew of sugar and licorice. (“Crack seed” is the catchall term for any fruit treated thus.) He’d sneak in one of the whole plums, which he’d cover with more slush. I’d find it buried deep, a shriveled prize, so tangy that when I sucked on it, the world condensed to that one flavor, a tiny neutron star of sweet-sour-salt.
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