I am actually referring to the meat cake, or yuk beng (Cantonese; 肉餅) of my youth. This yuk beng is a Southern Chinese “country” dish that consists of coarsely ground meat (usually pork), and various mix-ins such as mushrooms, water chestnuts, pickled vegetables or eggs, combined in a shallow dish (pie-plate like) and moulded to form a “cake”, seasoned simply with soy sauce and sesame oil, then steamed until done. The end result is a lovely, subtly flavoured dish of warmth, homeyness, and heartiness. The dish is meant to be shared family-style, so everyone would break off a bit of the meat cake, spoon a bit of the clear broth-like sauce tasting of soy, sesame, and pork fat over their rice, and tuck in. This is how steamed meat cake looks like:
I love this dish because besides being tasty, it is rustic, filling, easy, economical, and energy-conserving, since it is usually steamed in the rice cooker while cooking rice, hence saving on energy consumption. I especially love it because it is the star of my earliest food memories. I remember being four years old, watching my grandmum break off a bit of meat cake, spoon over its tasty juice and mash it all with rice in my pink enamel rice bowl, then command me, in her gruff Taishanese dialect, to heck fon, or eat up. And boy, do I remember eating up! I was a skinny kid (yeah really!) and my grandmum liked to boast how she fattened me up with her famous meat cake. We had it every week, sometime more than once, since there are so many meat cake variations (while I like the classic, I also adore the egg custard variation, which uses salted egg for extra flavour. I am not a huge fan of the salted fish version, though, since I am a little turned off by the notion of fish bones.) Plus, there is a non-steamed variation in which the ground meat is moulded with egg as a binder, formed into smaller patties, then pan-fried to create delectable little meat “cookies” of joy. The steamed version is the more common version, and the one I’ll be focusing on here.
In short, yuk beng equals hearty, homey, family comfort food for me, akin, I suspect, to meatloaf in more Western households. Yuk beng reminds me of my grandmum’s love and affection (when I was older, and we lived in different households, she would make yuk beng when I visited her, or she would bring me Tupperware containers of the stuff when she visited me. And she would still spoon the meat and sauce over my rice for me, no matter what age I was!) After my grandmum passed, my mum would continue the tradition of making yuk beng, because it is such a staple dish in Cantonese homes, and I would still get that same feeling of warmth and love from my mum’s version.
After I left the nest (albeit temporarily) for Hong Kong, while I am basically hapless in the cooking arena, I felt compelled to try to make yuk beng, since being far from home on my own can be a bit depressing. In Hong Kong, whose local cuisine is predominantly Cantonese, it is fairly easy to find casual diners that will serve some variation of this homey dish. But eating the dish outside of the home seemed wrong. Aside from the lack of "homeyness", the restaurant versions tasted saltier and fattier, more processed and fake, somehow. So when I finally bit the bullet and bought a rice cooker, I decided to try my hand at making yuk beng. After googling “steamed meat cake recipe” and finding a few workable possibilities, I set off for the supermarket. First stop was the meat department. I found ground pork neatly packaged and dropped a pack in my cart. But my eye was caught by a section with pre-prepped, ready to cook entrees. There was a selection of pre-moulded, seasoned, ready to steam meat cakes! And for nearly the same price as the raw pork – so you can imagine how quick I was to switch packages!
Now I know what you’re thinking. “That’s cheating.” Well, yeah. But it works for me -- don’t even need to mess around with chopping things and mixing things and measuring things.
I skipped home (ok, maybe skipped is too strong a word, but it was bouncier than my usual trudge) washed rice, popped the pre-fab meat cake into a shallow casserole dish (HK$10 at Jusco's $10 store -- I heart Jusco!), and placed it in the rice cooker’s steam rack. Thirty minutes later, I had fresh, piping hot rice, and a lovely little steamed meat cake to call my own. Here’s a picture:
The taste transported me home. I felt warm, loved, protected, and cherished. It’s almost as if grandmum worked some mojo from her swinging porch chair in heaven (or during a break from a marathon mah jong game) and zapped the pre-fab meat cake packages to my supermarket.
- http://chinesefood.about.com/od/pork/r/meat-cake.htm
- http://chinesefood.about.com/od/pork/r/steamedcustard.htm
- http://www.1chinesefoodrecipes.com/chinese-recipes/pork-recipes/recipes-steamed-meat-cake.php
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