Mrs. Cheung (or Auntie Cheung, she insisted I should call her) was born in Shunde, Guangdong China. She went to Hong Kong in 1948 at the age of sixteen to visit her brother and father, who were working in the city but couldn’t return to China without a visa. Since she wasn’t very inclined towards studying, she told me, she chose to stay. At nineteen years old, she married and at twenty-five, she was a mother to four children. 

She didn’t learn how to cook until after her marriage, when her mother began to teach her all her culinary knowledge. 

‘When it was time for me to enter the kitchen, then I learned,” she said. “Before that, [my mom] did everything.”

One of the recipes that Mrs. Cheung’s mother passed down was for golden-brown ‘fish tofu’ puffs, or 魚腐 (yúfu), one of Shunde’s regional specialties.

The ingredients and steps are simple. First, dace fish is minced and beaten with raw egg. Mrs Cheung used to mince the fish by hand, she said, but when culinary technology became popular, she switched to using a blender instead. The resulting mixture is then shaped into balls and then left to cook in oil just shy of boiling temperature. 

“It’s not frying,” she emphasized. “It’s a kind of soaking in oil at a low heat.”

The recipe became a firm family favorite, one that Mrs. Cheung made for many years.

“But I can’t buy the right ingredients anymore,” she said, referring to the dace fish. “None of it is exactly what I need.”

Nowadays, most fish puffs come in a different form than Mrs Cheung is familiar with: they’re deep fried, for the sake of convenience. Some iterations may not even contain real dace fish. To many consumers, myself included, this type of puff is all they’ve ever known. But to Mrs. Cheung, nothing compares to the handmade version.

“The texture of the fish puffs we used to make was completely different from what you can get today,” she reminisced, waving a hand in dismissal (and maybe a little bit of derision). “They were so incredibly smooth—so silky smooth that you couldn’t tell there was any fish in there at all.” 

“If you cook some noodles and eat them with the puffs, it’s so good you wouldn’t even know it,” she rhapsodized with a wide smile.

“Of course I like eating things like this,” she said finally. “It’s rural food, the food of my origins.”