Steamed Sponge Cake

Our Sunday table always included two reassuring foods, what I call our standard ‘comfort foods’: fresh chicken (which my mother most often dispatched, plucked and prepared herself) and sponge cake, which was central to the almost ritual afternoon tea with the neighbours. ‘Chicken every Sunday’ is as Chinese-American as sponge cake. (But rice remains the king of southern Chinese comfort foods.)

The chicken was usually either steeped or steamed, these being my mother’s favourite ways