Ange is my housemate from Auckland.
Though she only moved into our house two months ago, we’ve been friends for almost a year now, and she is always eating delicious-looking food around London. Most often, it’s delicious Chinese food. Ange grew up in New Zealand eating her family’s Chinese cooking, and I recently asked her to cook some recipes with me that reminded her of her childhood, of home, or of flavors that she loves. Ange chose steamed eggs two ways: one with a seasoned soy sauce topping and the other with a super flavorful ground pork topping. She also chose pork and prawn wontons. We ate it all with rice.
While folding wontons and frying ground pork, Ange and I talked about memory and recipe-sharing. Ange told me that she had texted her mum in New Zealand the day we were supposed to cook to ask for her steamed egg and wonton recipes. It was late at night in Auckland, and her mum had said something along the lines of “can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
We never got Ange’s mum’s recipe, but we made the best effort we could by combining a couple of recipes Ange had found online for the eggs and wontons, some of her memories and intuition, and some ingredients that I had in the fridge. Instead of reading her mum’s recipes, Ange talked about how her mum and her uncle had fought over bowls of steamed eggs as kids. Ange’s mum would cook for her brother when they were both teenagers, and claims that he was greedy when it came to steamed eggs. Knowing that he would eat her share if given the chance, she would prepare two renditions of the dish—first, a more watered down version of the dish that he would wolf down before she had finished cooking, and second, a more potent, eggy version that she would save for herself.
While overcooking rice and worrying about how much time to put on the microwave to correctly steam the eggs, I thought about how much recipes change over time and place. We cook with what we have, we cook according to the present situation (we get distracted talking to friends and fuck something up on the stove), and we use the internet now to ask questions of measurements and cooking times and to look up things like “replacement for Shaoxing cooking wine” because our local Asian grocer doesn’t sell it. Cooking and writing down Ange's recipes, or an amalgamation of Ange's intuition and family memory and multiple internet recipes, confirmed for me that recipe writing is about muddling and stealing and creating in a way that is not clean or straightforward.
There are very few recipes, or maybe none at all, that appear from thin air and pure culinary imagination. Cooking, like any other artform, is an act of constant referencing. Culinary information has been passed down to us in innumerable ways—through oral histories and family traditions and books and paintings and YouTube videos and Tik Toks—to a point at which even if you were to try really hard to escape all of the information about cooking that you’ve ever absorbed, you would never be able to create something completely novel.
Everything is recycled, regurgitated, refracted through those who cook and think about food, and those who have the means or the intent to write things down for others to take from. I’m writing these recipes down because I work as a cook, because I enjoy thinking about food as a form of record-keeping, and because I’m just vain enough to want people to read about the food I’ve made or eaten in some sort of publication.
The steamed eggs and wontons from these recipes were delicious, and we ate them at our kitchen table with Ange’s friend Annabelle who was visiting from Melbourne, and with my boyfriend, Robbie. Despite relatively daunting ingredient lists, they are very approachable and low-maintenance recipes for a dinner with friends. Folding 80 wontons between three people takes about 25 minutes. Make one element, or all of them, tweak them or rewrite them, even.
Recipe
For the wontons:
50-60 wonton wrappers
500g minced pork
400g peeled shrimp, finely chopped (there can still be some small chunks, i.e. it does not need to pulverized into a paste)
½ a knob of ginger
1 bunch spring onions, finely chopped
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine (we used mirin instead)
2 tablespoons sesame oil
1 teaspoon MSG or chicken powder
1 teaspoon white pepper
Plain flour for dusting
For the steamed eggs:
2 eggs
½ cup shirodashi (or mix one teaspoon shiro miso with water)
½ cup water
½ teaspoon salt
Spring onions and coriander, finely chopped, to garnish
For the seasoned soy sauce:
2 shallots, finely sliced
Stems from 1 bunch of cilantro, finely chopped
½ bunch spring onions, finely chopped
½ teaspoon white pepper
¾ cup water
¾ cup light soy sauce
2 tablespoons dark soy sauce
2 tablespoons black vinegar
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 teaspoon chicken powder or MSG
2 teaspoons maggi seasoning sauce
For the pork topping:
500g minced pork
200g oyster mushrooms, minced
2 tablespoons of ginger-garlic paste (or around a tablespoon of each minced or grated separately)
4 tablespoons doubanjiang (fermented soybean chilli sauce)
2 tablespoons black vinegar
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
½ tablespoon oyster sauce
1 tablespoon dark soy sauce
2 tsp maggi seasoning
2 teaspoons msg powder
1 cup shirodashi (use the same that you made for the steamed eggs)
1 tablespoon cornflour
4 tablespoons sugar
Method
Wontons:
1. Mix all of the filling ingredients in a large bowl until well combined.
2. Dust a large baking sheet with plain flour, and prepare a small bowl of water to dip your fingers in during the wrapping process.
3. Take a small amount (roughly 10-15g) of the filling mixture and place in the center of one of your wonton wrappers. Dip your finger in water and wet all four edges of the wonton wrapper before folding in half and pressing down to seal the edges with your filling in the center (be careful to also remove any air pockets as you are closing the wontons). Holding the rectangle with the longer edge facing you, wet one of the bottom corners and bring both corners together, pressing down to seal them, to create a distinctive bonnet shape.
4. Place your folded wonton onto the floured tray, and repeat until all your wontons are folded. (This amount of filling should make at least 80 wontons).
5. Drop your wontons into boiling water and cook for 4 minutes.
6. Serve with chili oil or chili crisp or whatever you love (we love Lao Gan Ma) and black vinegar.
Steamed Eggs Topping 1 (Seasoned Soy Sauce):
1. Fry off your coriander stems, shallots, and spring onions in a small amount of neutral oil until just barely coloured.
2. Add water and bring this mixture to the boil, and simmer until it has reduced by at least half.
3. Add everything else, bring to the boil, give it a final mix to make sure the sugar is dissolved and dispersed, and turn off the heat.
Steamed Eggs Topping 2 (Ground pork and mushroom):
1. In a large frying pan or skillet, heat your ginger and garlic in a few tablespoons of neutral oil until fragrant, and then add your ground pork.
2. You are going to want to fry the pork for quite a while over medium-high heat, stirring it often and using a fork to break it down into as fine pieces as possible. Add more oil if you can see it drying out. We want this pork crispy!
3. Once the pork is crispy add in your mushrooms, and fry until they have started to release some moisture and taken on some color.
4. Add all of your seasonings and stir to combine well. Once combined, add in your shirodashi and continue cooking until the whole mixture is bubbling away.
5. Lower the heat to a simmer and add in your cornstarch, mixing to combine well.
6. You want the sauce to coat the back of your spoon, and when the mixture is slightly sticky, turn the heat off. Check the seasoning and adjust however you like.
Steamed Eggs:
1. In a microwave safe bowl, use chopsticks or a fork to whisk together eggs, dashi, salt, and water.
2. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap, and poke a few holes for steam to escape.
3. Microwave for 2 minutes and 15 seconds, and serve.
4. Top with toppings of your choice. We made one bowl to top with seasoned soy sauce and 1 to top with the pork, though these recipes will make enough topping for at least 2 bowls of each!