A Dessert that I Can Never Taste

More than 20 years ago, in a small town called Sabak Bernam, I would be dubbed the grandson of “Luck Bee” (a Teow Chew pronunciation of a soup-based dessert) when some adults came across me. I was a primary school student back then.

"Luck Bee", by mere translation, means "six tastes". It is a soup-based dessert with 6 kinds of ingredients inside.

My grandmother was well-known among many adults in Sabak Bernam because she had been selling her signature "Luck Bee" in the small town for yonks. It was way before I was born.

To make "Luck Bee", she would soak malva nuts in a basin filled with rainwater taken from a big pail that was used to collect the rainwater to make them swell, forming a gelatinous mass. It has been traditionally consumed to cool our bodies.

She would start collecting dried coconut leaves that were easily available at the back of her house with countless coconut trees to light fire in a charcoal stove. She would then boil a pot of water on top of it.

After that, she would crack open the hard gingko nut shells to get the ginkgo nuts and wash them with water to remove their thin brown skin. Next, she would cut each of them into half before she could remove its bitter core. She would then put the cut ginkgo nuts into boiling water, put white sugar in the water and let the solution boil until it became concentrated, so the gingko nuts absorbed the sweetness.

She would also cook raw pearl barley and sago. The sago would then be soaked in cold water to avoid them from hardening.

She would then cut dried winter melon strips and dried persimmons into thin slices.

Finally, all the six ingredients were kept in separate containers.

These were the daily preparation works that my grandmother would do since morning. After early dinner at around 6 p.m., my grandfather would put the prepared ingredients in a wooden crate on his bicycle and push it slowly to a spot near a cinema in the town where the wheeled wooden stall was located. He would set up the stall and boil a big pot of water on a paraffin stove. The pot of water would be boiled with white sugar, pandan leaves and dried longans to give the soup its sweet fragrance. My grandmother would walk to the stall later so they could start their operation at about 7 p.m. 

When customers patronised the stall, my grandmother would scoop out small portions of the ingredients from the containers into a small vintage porcelain bowl imprinted with "ping pong kids", ladle out the clear brownish soup and voila, a bowl of steaming hot "Luck Bee" was served! It was charged at 60 sen per bowl back then.

Before I wrote this story, I gathered the information from some of my family members who had helped my paternal grandmother more than 30 years ago based on their best recollection. In other words, I have never tasted my grandmother's signature "Luck Bee" before. When I was a kid, my grandparents had long retired from running their business and the wheeled wooden stall had been sitting at the backyard of my old house, gathering dust. Little did I know about the value of the wheeled wooden stall that had helped them make ends meet. 

Although "Luck Bee" may seem ordinary to many people and there is a wide selection of desserts available today that I can afford to taste, my grandmother's "Luck Bee" is always the most luxurious dessert that I can never taste. 

My grandparents sitting at the front yard of the old terrace house where I grew up before I moved to another town in 2006 at the age of 16.