garnet carnet

tanghulu

táng hú lù is a traditional chinese snack consisting of malt sugar coated fruits of chinese hawthorn berries (crataegus pinnatifida) on a bamboo skewer / (my grandmother gifted us sacks of hawthorn derivatives. our lips puckered with plenty, wondering what it was like to grow up in the shade of sourness) / it is typically made by skewering hawthorn fruits and coating them in heated sugar syrup, which hardens in the cold. the pits and seeds are emptied before they are skewered and dipped / (i am only now learning what it truly means to fight. i'd only ever known yielding, or defiance, or losing by default, mostly) / hard crack sugar refers to syrup boiled to just between 300 and 310 degrees causing it to harden into a brittle, glass-like state upon cooling / (despite its many beloved forms, nobody eats a hawthorn berry raw. they are naturally sharply acidic, thin-fleshed, dry) / tanghulu has been made since the Song dynasty (960 - 1279), though in ancient times, other fruits were also used / (did my forebears fight like we do? have we found new fruits, new ways to break, or do we begin to crack in all the same places?)