Editor's note: This is another in a series of Origins features prepared in partnership with Share Your Table, an online food site.

On a hot day in Lahaina — and it was always a hot day in a Lahaina, where I grew up — there was nothing better than stopping by a shave-ice shop and wrapping your sweaty hand around the ice cold (and somewhat flimsy) paper cone, digging in with the totally inadequate miniature wooden spoon they gave you.

We judged the shop by which gave the most syrup. And it was just syrup in those days ... and maybe a scoop of sweetened azuki beans, if the bean steamer was working. The best shops really laid on the syrup so it went all through.

Everybody had their shave-ice eating technique. One: Scoop up the whole rounded top spoon by spoon, and then drink the juice in a race to see if you could get it all before the cone disintegrated entirely and the ice all went to water.

Some people liked to chew the ice, and some let it melt in their mouths.

I was a scooper and saver myself, but I never liked to chew — hurts my teeth.

Some days you'd be so hot and greedy you'd scoop too fast and get a painful brain freeze and have to stop and breathe for a while. Or do a dramatic samurai-dying-in-the-movies act to impress your friends.

I knew guys who would just bury their face in it and suck up the ice, developing a bright red or orange mustache as they slurped in as much as they could of the syrupy ice before they got to the bare stuff in the middle.

Those days — and I hate to make this sound like one of those I-walked-five-miles-to-school-in-the-blazing-sun stories, but we didn't have much. First of all, most of us rarely had a dime for a shave ice to begin with (yes, a dime). Second place, I think we only had three choices: red, orange, maybe yellow, I forget. And no rainbows. You ordered one flavor, and that's what you got.

Boy, how times have changed.

Today, shave ice (called, stubbornly and inexplicably, ice shave by Hiloans) has taken on a multicultural, multifaceted new life.

From Japan comes the custom of nestling a spoonful of sweetened azuki beans in the shave-ice cup. From the West, the combination of shave ice and ice cream. From the Philippines, fruit, soft young coconut, evaporated or sweetened condensed milk. From Southeast Asia, bubbles of tapioca. And from the creative minds of countless shave-ice makers, a wild range of Day-Glo colors and bizarre flavor combinations have taken the place of my childhood's basic "red" or "orange."

You can get it in a cup now, and that makes sense. You can get supersizes that make shave-ice eating into an Indy 500 race: Who will give up first? You or the ice?

It sure doesn't cost a dime anymore.

But still, on a hot day in Lahaina, or anywhere else, there's nothing better.

Send recipes and queries to Wanda A. Adams, Food Editor, Honolulu Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802. Fax: 525-8055. E-mail: wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.

For more information about our 150th anniversary cookbook, call 535-8189 (message phone; your call will be returned). You can order the cookbook online.