Instructions: When I was a child, my father cooked dinner for us every night at our familys restaurant in Oaklands Chinatown. Because we did not eat the same food as our customers, my siblings and I longed for such forbidden fruits as egg rolls, fried prawns, and sweet and sour pork. As with most children, we didnt fully appreciate at the time the wholesome, healthful meals our father provided.

But just as Marcel Proust accessed the sweet spots of his childhood with a taste of madeleine cakes, I visualize my fathers gentle smile every time I taste salted egg with minced pork. Father used preserved foods in almost all the dishes he served us: soup with dried bok choy, salted fish with ground pork, preserved vegetables steamed with slices of pork and steamed whole fish with fermented black beans and ginger.

In Cantonese-American families like mine, preservation saves not only food but also memory.

Initially, foods such as Chinese soy and black bean sauces were invented as a safe way to provide the working masses with enough protein to survive the barren seasons. In China, dried fish and shrimp, salted eggs, soy sauce and preserved vegetables have been used by the poor for perhaps five millenniums. When rich Chinese consumers learned to use them to enhance flavors, preserved foods moved up the food chain.

These days, in our jet-propelled, disposable society, we spend billions trying to preserve our skin tone, our hair color and our vision. The only reason preserved foods linger is because they have tastes that surpass even the freshest foods. For instance, dried shiitake mushrooms are more intense and flavorful than fresh mushrooms. Dried, candied plums, enhanced by dried tangerine peel and five-spice powder, enter a new dimension. And dried abalone, sharks fins, birds nest and squid are among the true delicacies of world cuisine.

Preserved foods are part of almost every culture. When I taught school in Texas, I learned to love the smoked meats of the American South. Traveling in Thailand, I took an instant liking to Southeast Asias fish and pepper sauces.

In Las Vegas, one of my favorite restaurants uses balsamic vinegars aged for 80 years. And at Yosemite National Park, I laugh at the prices backpackers pay for dehydrated foods.

Today, we cook with preserved foods because we like the way they taste but certainly not because they are easy to prepare. A good Carolina pork shoulder takes 12 hours to smoke. The hyperbole that is called the 1,000-year-old egg must be buried in dirt, where the egg is preserved by lysines that leach in from the soil. In southern Asia, fish and shellfish are laid in the sun for days, even weeks to dry.

In this era when Federal Express can deliver fresh foods halfway around the world, I still prefer a clay pot filled with the foods of my youth: chicken, mushrooms, tofu and salted fish. I love the 1,000-year-old egg that comes with a steaming bowl of rice congee, called jook. I never teach a cooking class without introducing fermented black beans, whether for spareribs or seafood. Since I teach primarily the Cantonese home cooking I learned from my parents, I feel I am preserving ancient traditions. And memories.

Like me, many of my Chinese-American friends look back fondly on preserved food as part of their childhoods. Frank Jang of San Mateo remembers hom donn jee yuk - salted duck eggs with pork hash. Cyndi Chen of Des Moines, Iowa, recalls how everything was pickled with plum. Eric Kwan of Honolulu loved mui choy jing jee yuk - salted, preserved mustard greens with minced pork marinated with

Chinese wine and soy. And Lily Yee Smith, who grew up in Phoenix, still puckers up to soy sauce-preserved grapefruit rind.

But for others, it is the preservation process - not taste - that conjures the strongest memories. Stephen Chung of Hawaii grew up in his parents Hunan restaurant in San Francisco, where his mother made a famous wushiang dofu - five-spice pressed tofu.

She had those special boards, cheesecloth and the all-important heavy, leadlike bricks. I have no idea where they came from. After a thorough marinade, in the special sauce, they were pressed under tremendous weight until all the water was gone, thus becoming a tough, grayish but flexible square. And in this preserved state, she could slice them and add to any stir-fry. Even now when I see them in a restaurant-prepared dish, I am reminded of Moms resourcefulness and energy.

Arnold Chew of San Jose remembers his grandmother trying to make salted fish when he was young. While others rolled the whole fish in salt and laid it on the roof to dry in the sun, that wasnt going to work in his family.

We lived with my grandma at this time at the edge of Oaklands Chinatown, near the highway. Lots of dirt was blown up by the traffic, so Grandma tried to dry the fish inside the garage. I remember the cats coming and eating the fish.

Then my dad and his brothers built a cage to hang the fish. Because it was indoors, the fish did not dry quickly and smelled a lot. They stopped making this after a few tries. Sometimes, the nose has a longer memory than the tongue.

Chef-author Shirley Fong-Torres is the owner of Wok Wiz Chinatown Tours & Cooking Co. in San Francisco. Contact her at wokwiz@aol.com or visit her Web site, www.wokwiz.com for information on tours and classes.

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