Chongqing cooks with chilli the way few other places do, and the city has an equally strong tradition of cold, sweet things to put the fire out. Most of them are sold from carts and tiny shops rather than from restaurants, cost a few yuan, and are eaten standing up. They are some of the most approachable street food in China for a visitor, because none of them is spicy and all of them are made from a handful of familiar ideas: rice, sugar and fruit.
Bingfen
Bingfen is a jelly that is extraordinary when you learn how it is made. The seeds of a small solanaceous plant related to the Chinese lantern are rubbed in cold water; the mucilage that comes off the seeds is collected and set with a touch of limewater into a soft, translucent, slightly trembling jelly. It has almost no flavour of its own, so it is served in brown sugar syrup with a pile of toppings: raisins, dried hawthorn, crushed peanuts, sesame, sometimes a spoonful of fermented rice, fresh watermelon or a little osmanthus. It is the standard thing to order at the end of a hotpot, and in summer the carts are everywhere.
Liangxia
Liangxia means cool shrimps, and the name comes from the shape: a thin rice-flour batter is pushed through a sieve into iced water, where it sets into small comma-shaped droplets that do look like tiny shrimps. They are served in the same brown sugar syrup, with ice, and eaten with a spoon. The texture is somewhere between jelly and soft noodle, and the flavour is again mostly the syrup. It is refreshing in a way that no pastry manages in thirty-degree heat.
Rice cakes and the rest
Glutinous rice is steamed, pounded until it is smooth and elastic, and then either rolled into balls and coated with toasted soybean flour and sugar, or pressed into slabs and grilled until the outside crisps and puffs. Both versions are served warm and are dense enough to count as a snack in themselves. Elsewhere on the same carts you will find douhua, the silken tofu pudding, which in Chongqing is normally served savoury with chilli oil and pickles rather than sweet, and cups of sour plum juice, which is the other great local answer to a chilli-heavy meal. Practical advice is simply to buy from carts with a queue and to carry small change.
