“LOOK Ammama, ice cream!” my niece tugs at my arm, one balmy evening as we sit down for a huge dinner at the famous Weng Yin seafood restaurant located at 9th Mile Port Dickson. She points to a modest kiosk located right outside and looks at me with imploring eyes. “Ice cream!” she repeats and promptly runs outside, drawn to the confectionery displayed like a moth to a flame.
The colourful sign hung up at the front says Coco Moo. Artisanal ice cream, it declares. I’m surprised. Artisanal ice-creams in upscale big-city Kuala Lumpur isn’t a rare sight. But here in the middle of a sleepy seaside resort town away from the glitz, trends and hype surrounding major cities, artisanal ice cream is being served up right outside a Chinese restaurant in the middle of nowhere!
Smiling at my incredulity, proprietor (or “ice cream lady” as my niece calls her) Chong Siew Lian practically beams from behind the counter, saying: “They’re all homemade… you should try some!”
The steamy humid weather we’ve been experiencing in Port Dickson had not abated even as night fell. The air feels heavy and unreasonably warm, yet to be fair: it is perfect ice cream weather. We haven’t had dinner yet, but the lure of ice cream proves irresistible. Minutes later, we’ve abandoned the dinner table temporarily and have milled around the kiosk, with little cups of ice cream in hand.
Local delights have found their way into swirls of lush ice cream – coconut, durian, black sesame and even gula melaka – the uniquely Malaysian version of coconut palm sugar that’s both smoky and toffee-edged in flavour.
“It’s delicious!” I murmur after my second cup of ice cream, and Chong asks with a wink: “Would you like to try another flavour?”
There’s something inherently decadent about eating ice cream for dinner, and Chong’s uniquely flavoured ice creams are a hit with my family. But still, Port Dickson of all places? Chong chuckles at my incredulity while serving up another scoop of durian ice cream to my delighted niece.
THE LURE OF ICE CREAM
Back in 1984, US President Ronald Reagan took time out of his busy schedule to declare July 19 as National Ice Cream Day. His written proclamation states the delicious treat is “the perfect dessert and snack food”.
Pop culture agrees with the late president, because there have been so many top ice cream moments in TV and movies over the years, from Oscar-winning movies to hilarious classic sitcoms. They’re so good they’ll have you craving a scoop for yourself. You scream, I scream, we all scream for ice cream indeed.
Ice cream does do something funny to a lot of us: it makes us nostalgic and happy and, if you take your cues from Bridget Jones, it helps us recover from heartbreak. The world is more colourful, slower-paced and simply more fun with an ice cream.
There are a few reasons why this is the case. We are particularly conditioned to like foods that change texture in our mouths: as ice cream melts from solid to liquid, it keeps our brains interested.
When you lick an ice cream, the emulsion covers all the sensors of your tongue, from back to front, making your taste buds sing with sweet, savoury and sharp sensations. It is easy to digest and places very low on something called the satiety index, which means you can eat a lot without feeling unpleasantly full.
When you break down the chemistry behind ice cream, it’s easy to see why it remains a perennial childhood favourite. It’s been engineered to the perfect combination of elements — sugar, fat, frozen water and air — that make up the mouth-watering concoction. It really isn’t your fault that ice cream is so tempting — it’s science!
“The best ice cream is what comes with experience,” Chong avers. “I’ve tasted some of the best ice creams from around the world, and I wanted to ensure that anything I produce would somehow taste better. That’s the only way I understood it would work.”
Like so many foods, ice cream has headed merrily into the world of local, handmade, artisanal elevation. But ice cream that pays less rent — the old-school regional ice creams on which entire childhood narratives have been built — remains immune to such culinary pressure.
“Practically every flavour I’m offering is an ode to my childhood,” declares Chong enthusiastically. Her initial flavours were based on the desserts she had as a child, she reveals, adding: “…things like red bean, sweet corn, pulut hitam (black glutinous rice pudding) and all the fruits I loved like mango, jackfruit and durian!”
It would be difficult to argue that any other food holds a stronger connection to memory than ice cream does. Ask most Malaysians about their favourite childhood dessert and the descriptions will be vivid and specific.
“My ice creams evoke those memories,” states Chong, smiling. Business, she tells me proudly, has been good and there’s a growing community of people who would travel all the way to Port Dickson for her ice cream.
In some circles, the nostalgic beauty of a quart of Chong’s pulut hitam creamy concoction in Port Dickson beats out any fancy high-fat, chef-spun ice cream.
THE LONG ROAD TO ICE CREAM
Still, it took a while for Chong to actually venture into the ice cream business. Born in Penang, Chong recalls growing up in hotels.
“My mother was a UK-trained hairdresser and she had a salon at the E&O Hotel. I was attracted to the industry, seeing the hotel general manager walk around in a shiny suit… I wanted the same for myself!” she recounts with a laugh, adding: “Of course, it was such a naive illusion at that time!”
She pursued a hotel management and catering qualification in Switzerland where she tells with another chuckle, how the illusion of glamour was shattered into many pieces.
“I was horrified. The perceived glamour was just that. A perception. I had to wash dishes and that quickly wiped off any form of grandeur I had with the hotel industry!” she says, grinning. Still she grew to enjoy it and started off her career in the hotel industry at the age of 18.
“I loved the food and the people but I didn’t quite like the long hours attached to the industry. That wasn’t for me,” admits Chong.
Soon after, she left and joined the airlines where she remained for 20 years. “Once you’ve done all the travelling and seen all the places in your bucket list, you focus on the food!” And food remained her favourite pastime.
“It’s a wonderful way to experience world culture… through food,” she enthuses. Eventually she retired and returned to Malaysia.
“After a while, you grow weary and you want to put down your roots somewhere,” she reveals half-wistfully. Chong decided to move to Port Dickson.
From Penang to Port Dickson? I ask, curious.
“Well my mother decided to move to Australia after remarrying at the age of 60!” she replies, adding: “Yet she was still very much attached to her birth country and insisted on a holiday home here.”
At the advice of some relatives, they decided to settle for Port Dickson.
“My mother contracted Parkinson’s, and we felt that this was the place she could visit and spend some time recuperating,” she recalls.
Sadly, by the time the home was purchased, Chong’s mother was too ill to travel as frequently as she would have liked. “My mother passed away a few years ago,” she says softly. Her durian ice cream, Chong reveals, was made in memory of her mother. “She loved her durians just as passionately as she loved life!” she recalls, her eyes glistening.
A SECOND WIND
Her passion for food resurfaced years later when she grew restless and wanted to do something else.
“I wanted to create my own path,” admits Chong. “The first path of my life was spent working for an establishment. That was all good because I needed to learn how the world works and build up my finance,” she elaborates. “Now comes the second act and this time, I wanted to chart my own course.”
Stumbling upon an ice cream recipe set off a journey into unchartered territories.
“I was introduced to homemade ice cream by a friend who obtained a recipe from an old woman. It wasn’t perfect but the flavours were there,” recalls Chong.
The ice cream she tasted lingered at the back of her mind for years before she decided to improvise with the recipe and come up with her very own signature flavours.
“I realised that there was a large untapped market for artisanal ice cream. It sparked my interest but it took a whole decade for me to finally bring it out for everyone to try!” she says wryly.
Why, I ask, surprised. “No confidence!” she replies simply, shrugging her shoulders with a rueful smile. Coming up with the perfect recipe took years of trial and error.
“There were a lot of times I wasn’t happy with what I made. I’ve thrown away up to 30 kilogrammes of ice cream at one time because I wasn’t satisfied with the taste,” she admits.
Once she came up with a blend she was happy with, she went on to test it out on her friend’s children. “When they loved it and asked for second helpings, I knew I hit on a winning formula!” she says, laughing heartily.
She sources her ingredients herself, choosing to go into villages to get young coconuts (her ice creams have the unique blend of fresh coconut cream and milk).
“I don’t compromise on ingredients. The coconuts are selected based on their age and flavour,” she says firmly.
This, she learnt, after years of reworking her recipe and learning from those in the food business. “That’s how you get the best flavour combination,” she insists.
She convinced a friend who owned a restaurant to allow her to open up a little kiosk outside, “…just to see if the rest of the world would like my ice cream,” and her friend agreed.
“I only had about 18kg of ice cream to sell but to my surprise and delight, I had to close my business after just two days because I sold everything!” she recounts. That small experiment marked the beginning of Chong’s ice cream business and she’s not looked back since.
For the affable 55-year-old ex-stewardess, life after 50 has been remarkable.
In a world where retirement seems to be the death knell of a career, it makes absolutely no sense to treat anyone over 50 as if they’re coasting downhill to retirement, when the truth is they may have almost two decades of working life or more, left in them.
“Why shouldn’t people be able to reinvent themselves at this age, to rethink a career choice they might have made 30 years ago and long outgrown or to learn something new?” she demands, adding: “There’s a lot of retirees who don’t know what to do with their time at this next stage in life. That’s not a nice place to be in. I hope that I can inspire them to believe in themselves and realise that they can still contribute. It’s never too late for an encore career!”
As I scoop the final remnants of her delightful gula melaka ice cream into my mouth, she smiles at the contentment that’s written all over my face.
“People get very emotionally connected to a flavour, and they rarely change,” she says softly. “But they want to share their favourite flavours with the people they came with. It becomes a way of telling a story about yourself.”
I can’t help but think that in Chong’s case, her ice cream represents her memories and stories now being shared with just about anyone with a sweet tooth. And glancing at my niece who’s still looking blissful while savouring her durian ice cream, I realise that in that moment — new memories and stories are being made.
All it simply takes is a great homemade Malaysian ice cream to create that magic.
COCO MOO ARTISANAL ICE CREAM
2011, Jalan PDS1, Batu 6 Shell Sunggala ( next to McDonalds)
Hours: 12pm-10pm. Closed on Mondays
9th Mile, Port Dickson
Hours: 6.30pm-10.30pm
Open on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, public holidays and school holidays.