Grass jelly may be an Asian drink, but it's not crazy
Chris Pirillo
discovered
Crazy Asian Drinks,
a Web site devoted to the beverage preferences of people
from the eastern part of Asia.
Now, the text is really funny (which is important),
but I would like to come to the defense of
grass jelly drink.
First of all, when I was growing up, grass jelly wasn't a drink.
It was a dessert.
It came in a block, and you diced it up into pieces
about one cubic centimeter in size—not the microscopic flecks
that you end up in the beveragicized version.
You put a few spoonfuls of it in a bowl and stirred in some
sugar water and crushed ice.
Of course, you had to crush the ice yourself by hand, because that's
the way it was done; it built up the anticipation.
(You had to crush it uphill both ways.)
When you assembled the dessert, you ate it with a spoon.
This grass jelly drink is just a pale imitation of the original.
It's like if somebody mocked Jell-O gelatin because it was
served to them pureed in a shot glass.
(And
Happy New Year, everybody.)
