This is a story about the classic Cantonese dish, Egg Foo Yong. As you often find with my posts, you will get recipes, photos, personal reminiscences, a history lesson, and a chance to try your own hand at re-creating a meal.
My wife is an accomplished cook in many areas. One of her favorites is Chinese food. Ever since we took a series of cooking lessons 40 years ago at the home of her friend, Eugenia, she has been comfortable with a variety of dishes. When we moved toward vegan/vegetarian options, this was especially helpful.
Last week she decided to make fried rice, with a bunch of cooked brown rice leftover from another meal. That decision led her to shop at an Asian food market nearby, where she bought a large bag of mung bean sprouts, cleaner and fresher than anything we would find at other supermarkets. The total price was $1.47. The fried rice was made with other leftovers and the bean sprouts, and it was delicious, as always. However, she still had more than half the bag of sprouts, and she was anxious to use those while they were nice and fresh, so she determined that it was time to figure out how to make Egg Foo Yong as the vehicle to consume them.
To find a good recipe, her first thought was to go to the bookshelf and to examine the Joyce Chen Cookbook, written in 1961. For those of you not familiar with this famous chef, you will find her personal story fascinating. She is best described by this: Celebrity chef Ming Tsai later said of Chen, “She is the Chinese Julia Child […] Joyce Chen helped elevate what Chinese food was about. She didn’t dumb it down. She opened people’s eyes to what good Chinese could taste like.”
Since we lived in and around Cambridge from 1963, we often went to her restaurants and talked with her in person. One of the last times we saw her was in 1970, when we had a mini-banquet with family to celebrate the completion of my doctoral degree. That dinner was in her restaurant along Memorial Drive in Cambridge, and it remains a powerful memory.
Here are the two recipes which were merged for our dinner last week. The first is from Joyce Chen and the second one, from Kay Chun, via the New York Times Cooking section online.
After a good deal of prep work and skill with a hot wok, here are the results of superb Egg Foo Yong.
Just to be sure we had enough for dinner, she also made Noodles with Oyster Sauce, Garlic, Ginger and Scallions. It’s truly amazing what one can do with $1.47 worth of fresh bean sprouts!
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