Setting Expectations. Be warned: there is no recipe at the bottom of this article. This is a story about how I made a dish, not necessarily instruction on how to make the dish yourself.
OR: HOW I HAMMERED A STEAK AND LEARNED ABOUT CANTONESE CUISINE
Wong Kar Wai originally titled his magnum opus “A Story of Food”. His idea was to make a movie compromised of small vignettes of regular people eating in Hong Kong. In the end, he focused on just one of the vignettes he’d thought of: a man and a woman having serendipitous encounters at their local noodle stall (a staple of mid-century Hong Kong). What resulted was a story that was as much about that man and woman as it was about the meals they shared.
Set in Hong Kong in the 1960s, In the Mood for Love follows Mr. Chan and Mrs. Chow, two people living in the same claustrophobic apartment complex who slowly realize their spouses are cheating on them with one another. They start off as strangers, occasionally passing each other on their way to pick up dinner at the local noodle cart, they eat alone at home as their cheating spouses “work late”. We watch as, like planets in orbit of each other, they come closer and closer together until, eventually, they collide. They begin to share meals and conversations and, over time, a romance emerges.
There are lots of incredible food moments in this film. The early interactions of our two star-crossed lovers are their brushes against each other as they pass in the alleyway on their way to the local noodle cart. There is a pivotal scene where they are trapped in one of their apartments together with little else to do but eat and talk about their feelings. A very famous scene takes place in a western-style steakhouse (ubiquitous to 1960s Hong Kong) where Mr. Chan reaches across the table to spoon mustard on Mrs. Chow’s plate.
Needless to say, there are a lot of foods in this movie I could tackle recreating. But, for some reason, I’m drawn to the steak.
Perhaps, I’m drawn to it because of the role it serves in the film. This is the first proper meal the two enjoy together. When Mr. Chan reaches across the table to put a dollop of hot mustard on Mrs. Chow’s plate, they open a bottle of intimate vulnerability that cannot be resealed.
Maybe because it seems more approachable to me. As much as I love and respect Chinese cuisine, I was raised on a western palette. A steak and potatoes dinner seems more doable to me than many of the much tastier-looking Cantonese dishes enjoyed during the film.
Something tells me I’m also drawn to it because it’s easily the least appetizing thing eaten in the movie. The plate of food Mrs. Chan eats is either elegantly simple or depressingly bland and there’s only one way to find out for sure.
So let’s get into how I recreated the steak dinner from In the Mood for Love.
The Dish
(Or: A Brief History of Soy Sauce Western Cuisine in Hong Kong)
The type of cuisine you’d find at the restaurant our two characters are dining at is western-influenced Chinese food. Popular in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s, “Soy Sauce Western” was about cooking western dishes using locally available ingredients and Chinese cooking techniques.
In the 1960s, Hong Kong was still a British colony which meant a lot of British influence (and British people) were present in the city. This gave rise to restaurants that specialized in emulating western foods and cooking techniques but with a Cantonese spin. (For a longer, more in-depth historical summary of this, I recommend localiiz’s summary.)
What looks to be actually on that plate are four things.
A steak (cut could be NY strip or ribeye but that’s dubious I.D. on my part)
A boiled or steamed new potato with flecks of garlic(?) on it
Some kind of almost luminescent cabbage
That sexually charged dollop of hot chinese mustard
We have our ingredients in mind, let’s go to the store.
Shopping
The Steak
I don’t eat a lot of steak, or much beef at all. I know the basics of buying steak but don’t have a great grasp on cuts or what I should be looking to pay for a decent steak. Our couple is at, what appears to be, a very nice restaurant so I don’t want to just buy the first steak I see, but I also don’t have a huge budget to play with. I read some articles about buying good steaks on a budget and the recommendations were for bottom sirloin or top round since ribeye and NY strip are both on the pricey side. They also said that if I can’t find those exact cuts I should “ask my butcher for a recommendation.”
So I went to Safeway and couldn’t find bottom sirloin or top round, so I asked my butcher for a similar cut. The butcher responded with the friendly but firm universal phrase: “Girl, I don’t know.”
Overwhelmed, I pointed at a steak in the case that appeared to have some marbling, had the grass-fed symbol on it, and was only 15 dollars a pound. The label above the price had fallen off, which the butcher noted as she tried to key in the code. She asked me: “what cut is this?”
“Girl, I don’t know.”
Potato
Here’s a fun fact: China is the world’s leading producer of potatoes, producing a little over a fifth of the world’s potatoes. The potato in this recipe looks to be a simple preparation which means picking not just any potato but the right potato is a key consideration. There are, give or take, 4,000 varieties of potatoes grown all around the world, so I imagine the potato that goes completely untouched on Maggie Cheung’s plate is not one of the 6 or 7 potato varieties found at my local Safeway.
Still, 4,000 varieties is probably an inflated number since, at the end of the day, we’re still just talking about spuds. The spud on the plate looks to be some kind of white, young potato (just like me), so that’s what we’re going with.
Cabbage
More of us should be eating cabbage. There. I said it. I don’t care if it makes your farts smell weird or whatever, it’s amazing and so good for those of us with sensitive tummies. Cabbage can be scary to buy because they’re the size of a volleyball and six times as heavy. But I’m not afraid, I’ll gladly spike that big giant head of farty green into my cart.
Normally, I would go with a savoy or a napa cabbage for their lighter, sweeter flavor. But, for this recipe, my focus is on achieving that bright, white color. So, I went with the palest, densest, most factory-farmed-looking cabbage they had.
Hot Mustard
I didn’t have to buy anything here since there’s a jar of Chinese hot mustard in my fridge. If you don’t already have a jar of hot mustard (or a drawer full of takeout packets of the stuff) it’s very easy to make it yourself at home. Just take some dry finely ground mustard powder (any hot variety will work), mix it with hot water until you get a paste, and thin it out with oil and rice vinegar. Boom, mustard.
Tony Leung not included.
Preparation
Ingredients acquired it’s time to cook.
First, the steak. The steak I bought was pretty thick and I wanted it to look more like it does in the movie, which is relatively flat. So, step one was to take my stainless steel pan and beat the steak within inches of its life. Is this good steak cookery? Probably not. Science says the pounding broke down some muscle fibers to make a more tender eating experience. Practicality says that by pounding it out I made my task of getting it to medium-rare Sisphyian levels of impossible.
Next, a marinade felt like the right idea. The steak in the movie doesn’t appear to be sauced but reading some Cantonese menus told me that a simple salt and pepper wasn’t going to cut it. I didn’t want to go too crazy since, in my research, I learned that Cantonese cuisine tends to prioritize delicacy over big flavors. So, a little bit of soy sauce (just enough to cover the steak), some sesame oil, a little sugar, thinly sliced garlic, salt, and a few chili flakes.
I did a room-temperature marinade since I didn’t feel like the marinade needed much time to penetrate and, as I said, I’m going for delicate. And also because I was hungry and didn’t want to take an hour letting it marinade in the fridge and then another half hour to get it to room temperature. Just leave it in the marinade on the counter while it comes to room temp.
Okay, it’s potato time. I struggled a lot with what to do with the potatoes and spent considerable time staring at the stills from the movie wondering what on God’s green earth all those little flecks were. One thing I did know was that the potato appeared to be boiled or steamed. I quartered the potatoes and let them soak in water as I continued to agonize about those darn little flecks.
I looked through some of my old cookbooks for a spark of what the heck my ancestors did to make boiled potatoes taste nice. Then I found it. In an old copy of Women’s Day there was a lunch recipe involving a boiled potato tossed in garlic and butter. Jackpot.
So I roughly chopped some garlic and melted a few tablespoons of butter. I wanted to soften the flavor of the garlic but didn’t want it to toast. I put the garlic in a heat-safe bowl and poured the melted butter over the fresh garlic and let it sit until it was time.
Cabbage was simple enough. I followed a recipe that lured me in with its clickbait title – the most popular Chinese cabbage recipe. Sold to the woman in the Cheongsam.
I left out the chili and replaced the garlic with julienned ginger. I wanted the dish to be bright white (so no chili) and wanted a flavor profile that was different than garlic (hence the ginger).
Now, cooking the steak. A thing I am extremely afraid of doing and am now seeing why a little voice in my head said “are you sure you want to pound it so thin?”
Steak cooking, for me, is a simple art that is easy to learn and hard to master. I watched some videos on steak cookery and found that, apart from sous vide, the best way to cook steak at home was a reverse sear. That means getting to temp in the oven and then searing it before serving.
Here’s a general tip for cooking meat. Let your meat (or any protein) get to room temperature before you cook it. This helps the meat cook more evening and prevents it from drying out.
So, the steak goes onto a tray in the oven at 350 (a pure guess of a temperature) for 10 or 15 minutes to reach 120 degrees internally. This is foreshadowing for later as my unwillingness to look up a recipe would eventually be my downfall.
While that’s in the oven, we get our searing station ready. A heavy skillet of either stainless steel, cast iron, or carbon steel (basically anything that is not your non-stick pan, please don’t sear your steak in a non-stick pan). Get the pan screaming hot and once your steak comes out of the oven at the right temperature oil your pan and get your steak in there.
Sear on both sides until you just about hit your desired temperature (for me 130 degrees). Butter basting is an option here but I decided not to since that didn’t feel right in this recipe.
While the steak is resting, I tossed my potatoes in the warm garlicky butter and was over the moon to see that I had achieved my target mysterious flecks. All that’s left now is plating on the greenest plate that I own.
We can’t forget the little dollop of hot chinese mustard on the side.
“Your wife likes it spicy.”
The Verdict
A few things.
Am I feeling great about the plating? No. Does it look like it does the movie? Kind of also no. Am I putting that on me? Not entirely. My steak is too small which I can blame on the budget and I underestimated how much that bright teal plate brought to the dish. My muted forest green plate doesn’t cut it.
Cooking like this was a great little challenge. There was so little room to hide that it demanded lots of attention to detail. In a dish like this where all the flavors are so delicate and the components so few there’s no room for error. It was a great way to practice the basics — cooking a piece of meat, boiling a potato, things in the kitchen I take for granted a lot.
I totally hammered the steak and was thankful the image from the movie isn’t a sliced steak because if I had to slice it for this image you would have seen how utterly I destroyed an 18-dollar piece of meat.
For the record, it was still tender and tasty. I’m a simple woman who doesn’t have strong opinions on steak cooking. But, as a person running a food blog, the image would have been extremely embarrassing.
These garlic butter potatoes are the truth. If you ever want to mix up your potato preparation these are a delight. Boiled potatoes are essentially just mashed potatoes that haven’t been mashed yet. Add to that garlic butter? Say less.
The only thing I was left wanting for was something green. I would have liked a green bean or just a salad or something on the side. But, otherwise, these three components are a perfectly good little meal.
Overall, this was a fun experiment that I would definitely do again and recommend to all. This is going to make this sound like it was sponsored (it wasn’t) but if you want to watch In the Mood for Love, you definitely should. It’s streaming on HBO Max.