Early spring in 1996 was the kind of spring that gets remembered. Not because anything particularly historic happened (nothing did, or at least nothing I was involved in) but because the light was a specific quality and the air had a particular smell and I was sixteen years old, which is an age when everything gets encoded more vividly than it will ever be again. I remember that early spring with the kind of detail that I can no longer apply to things that happened last Tuesday. I remember the temperature of the air. I remember what songs were playing on the radio. And I remember, with absolute crystalline precision, the first time I tasted Har Gow, at a table in Great-Aunt Vera's house, with the specific afternoon light coming through the window at an angle that made everything look slightly cinematic. Memory is strange. It keeps the things you don't expect it to keep and loses the things you most needed to hold onto. It kept this.
Let me describe the smell of Har Gow being made properly, because this is the thing I miss most and can least explain. There's an early stage, before the ingredients have fully committed to becoming a dish, where the kitchen smells like possibility: warm and complex and slightly mysterious. Then something shifts and the smell deepens, gets more specific, becomes the thing and not just the suggestion of the thing. My strongest memory of Great-Aunt Vera's kitchen is that smell at that second stage, the moment of commitment. I have tried to recreate it. I have come close. But the smell of your own cooking is different from the smell of someone else's cooking; you've been with it the whole time and you lose the ability to be surprised by it, which is, I think, part of what made Great-Aunt Vera's version so powerful. I arrived knowing nothing, and the dish introduced itself.
The honest description of what Har Gow tastes like is almost impossible to write because the best version of it tastes like a feeling more than a flavor. There's the obvious part, the taste itself, which is wonderful and which I can gesture at without quite hitting, and then there's the other part, the part underneath, which is warmth without temperature and comfort without logic and the particular satisfaction of something made with attention. You know it when you encounter it. You spend the rest of your life looking for it again.
This is the part where I should note that the actual recipe will be along shortly. By "shortly" I mean at some point in the future that I am not prepared to specify, because every time I have specified a date I have missed it, and I've decided that vagueness is more honest than false precision. The story is here. The feelings are documented. The instructions are somewhere, in a notebook, in my memory, in the hands of my great-aunt who has since made the information permanently unavailable through the simple act of no longer being here to share it. I'm working on it. That's the best I can offer. I hope it's enough to bring you back.