[Sca-cooks] OP food question

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach lilinah at earthlink.net:

>Another tasty thing he introduced me to was a giant dinner plate 
>sized thin ground pork patty with plenty of garlic... I never found 
>a recipe for this...
>
>So, Frater Adamantius, anyone else... can you help?

Ah, steamed pork patty... this is alleged to be a down-home type dish 
that rarely turns up as mainstream restaurant fare except in the old, 
hard-line Cantonese restaurants. Back when most Chinese restaurants 
in the US were Cantonese, and when most of _those_ were run by 
immigrants from Toysan (essentially the Cantonese Hielands, as it 
were, complete with an accent nearly undecipherable to mainland 
Cantonese people), this is what Cantonese-American families would eat 
as part of Sunday dinner, but they might be ashamed to order it in a 
restaurant or serve it at a banquet.

So, naturally, it's actually good stuff deserving of greater exposure. ;-)

Lots of garlic, huh? Hmmm. Maybe a Taiwanese influence...

Anyway, you make a basic chopped, seasoned pork mixture, such as you 
might stuff into wontons or other dumplings, and then you can add any 
of several other ingredients. My wife's family are originally from 
Toysan, an area with several short growing seasons and access to 
inexpensive salt, so their cuisine is typified by an enormous variety 
of salt-preserved fish, meats, and vegetables, added judiciously to 
other foods as a seasoning.

Here's a basic formula from Winona and Irving Chang's "An 
Encyclopedia of Chinese Food and Cooking":

1/2 pound ground pork
9 canned water chestnuts, chopped fine
1 tsp cornstarch
2 Tbs water
1 Tbs light soy sauce
1/2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt

Mix all ingredients and flatten mixture into a flat serving dish 
[such as a Pyrex pie plate] suitable for steaming. Place dish in 
steaming utensil and steam for 25 minutes.

Now, I would always prefer fresh water chestnuts if available, and 
would also add chopped scallion and/or cilantro to this basic 
mixture, and my lady wife would be offended to discover this recipe 
lacks the requisite white pepper and dash of peanut oil. These are 
considered non-negotiable in our house, whereas chopped garlic is 
considered essential by some.

You can steam and eat this mixture (it ends up looking like a 
1/2-inch thick steamed hamburger patty spread entirely across a 
dinner plate; draining off the juice for ease of service is a major 
crime) as is, or add to it:

--Chopped lop cheung (Chinese sausage)
--Minced or in the form of a chunk, just rinsed, salt fish (red 
snapper is a common salt fish used this way; I don't mean salt cod, 
necessarily)
--Salted duck eggs, cracked onto the top and spread across the 
surface before steaming
--Minced, salted & preserved Chinese radish/turnip, or salted Chinese 
mustard knobs, plain salted or the kind that are rolled in red chili 
powder
--Sweet Chinese cucumber pickle (think sweet gherkins preserved in 
soy sauce), chopped

The standard at our house is to always use the radish or mustard, 
plus the salted duck eggs or, more rarely, the sausage.

Adamantius