The Ultimate Food Test : Hong Kong memories: Before he could marry the girl of his dreams, he had to pass her aunt’s inspection--over lunch.

A joyous table? Surely it was. Anyway, it is enough that I believe it was. Thus my recollections of that meal three decades ago in the little house behind a garden wall in Hong Kong are recurrent pleasures.

Although one cannot always trust without reserve such memories of fine times, for they tend, with the years, to acquire inordinate luster and softened edges, never have I doubted that the lunch with an aunt-to-be was conceived and prepared with anything less than love, no matter that it was budding and tentative. But the joy generated within me was eventual rather than immediate, for my meal that day was nothing less than a trial by table.

What I have come to regard as “the lunch” came at a time when I had been repeatedly asking Lo Yin-Fei, the woman who was ultimately to become my wife, if she would indeed marry me, and she had been indicating, repeatedly, that she might--a reply I regarded with unyielding optimism simply because it was not no.

Those days in Hong Kong, young Chinese women of proper rearing were not generally to be seen in the company of Westerners, a circumstance I chose to ignore. Yin-Fei, who had adopted the English name of Eileen when she came from Canton to Hong Kong, could not. I persisted, however, through many late evenings and hurried cups of coffee (“dates”) and through a particular stilted lunch one afternoon with our chaperon, a Mr. Lee, who glared at us--me--as I tried to eat noodles and vegetables with excessive nonchalance.

Then one day Eileen told me, “My aunt would like to invite you to lunch at our home.” I correctly interpreted it as a summons.

So on the chosen afternoon, I made my way along Prince Edward Road to the house behind the garden wall where Eileen’s aunt, Luk Gu Cheh (whose name, according to Eileen, was more than a name--”my number six aunt, my father’s younger sister”), lived with a son, three daughters and a niece.

I jangled the doorbell and Eileen let me in, showed me to a small parlor, poured me some of the luk on tea, soft and red, favored by her aunt, then led me, teacup in hand, to the kitchen where her aunt was preparing lunch.

Luk Gu Cheh had shopped early at the Mong Kok Market on Watercress Street for a special “white silk” chicken from Loong Gung in Canton, for a lovely fat garoupa fish and gei wei shrimp, sweet and farm-raised, still alive and darting about in buckets of fresh water behind the house.

There were chunks of silk squash blanching in chicken broth, and Luk Gu Cheh was slicing green stalks of choi sum. She nodded to me. Nodded. I watched and drank red tea. Eileen’s cousins came home. Each of the girls--Josephine, Christina and Shirley--peeped in at me, giggled, then went off to help set the table in the parlor, to change, to compare impressions perhaps. Whatever. When her son David arrived, Luk Gu Cheh motioned me inside to the table, now set with cups, bowls and chopsticks.

When we settled, Luk Gu Cheh brought in the shrimp mounded onto a platter, then sat down directly across from me. So she could look at me. The shrimp were glorious, steamed with large clumps of minced garlic. We ate them with our fingers, peeling off the shells and sucking the juices from the head cavities. They were wonderfully messy and utterly delicious. When Luk Gu Cheh saw that I was having no trouble peeling them, she nudged one of her daughters with an elbow and nodded with what I took to be approval.

The chicken came next. It had been cut into pieces and marinated in the juices of lemon and ginger, in rice wine and sesame oil, and then steamed with quartered fresh lemons. Marvelous. The choi sum had been stirred with oyster sauce and was brought in while we were still having at the chicken with our chopsticks. Luk Gu Cheh watched me eat, watched the way I used chopsticks and said something softly in Cantonese to Eileen.

“My aunt says you hold your chopsticks like a Japanese. She does not like that so much,” Eileen said.

The garoupa was brought in, steamed, decorated with slivered ginger and green onions and shreds of pork. Luk Gu Cheh turned the platter so that the fish’s head faced me. “My aunt wants you to have the cheek meats, an honor and the eye.”

The eye?

“The eye,” Eileen repeated, “or my aunt will be unhappy.”

I ate the cheek. I ate the eye, smothered in ginger and green onions and a good portion of the garoupa’s body as well. It was a most delicious fish, a taste I relive with each visit to Hong Kong, and Luk Gu Cheh smiled upon me, faintly, and poured me some red tea. Later, as we walked along Prince Edward Road, Eileen told me that Luk Gu Cheh had told her that there was every possibility that I might be approved as a nephew, by marriage. Nor was it very much later that Yin-Fei, Eileen, changed her “might” to “yes.”

Had it been Luk Gu Cheh’s lunch? I guessed yes. The eye of the garoupa ? If anything.