Chasing down a favorite food from your past can be a lot like looking up an old girlfriend: you’d better be prepared for disappointment — or worse, a bad case of indigestion.

Things are rarely as delicious as we remember, since deliciousness is as much a product of appetite as it is a particular combination of ingredients. A dry, run-of-the-mill chicken salad sandwich from food services at a hospital can be a mind-blowing gustatory pleasure — if you’ve been suffering a day-long food embargo.

The novelist Oscar Hijuelos once went looking for a mystical drink from his childhood visits to Cuba — a local concoction of such sweet, dark, ancestral mystery that he assigned it magical properties. Imagine his disappointment when he finally got around to asking his relatives for the recipe, only to discover that the drink of his Cuban dreams was ordinary chocolate milk — made with imported Hershey’s syrup!

One of the foods in my own pantheon is a Chinese dish I used to order at the Ta Chien restaurant near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, circa 1985. It was called “TWO-SIDE PAN FRIED LO MEIN, CHICKEN!”

I’ve just shouted it in all-caps for reasons of authenticity. The waiters at the Ta Chien, a tiny hole-in-the-wall with about ten tables, didn’t bother to write down your order until it was time to pay. They preferred to communicate verbally with the chef, screaming to make themselves heard first in English, presumably so you could correct them if they’d misheard the order, and then in Chinese.

“TWO-SIDE PAN FRIED LO MEIN, CHICKEN!” was a fan favorite not just for the steaming heap of stir-fried chicken and vegetables in a garlicky brown sauce that emerged from the kitchen four or five minutes later, piled high on a nest of crispy pan-fried noodles. The noodles were the real star of the show. Their texture varied from crunchy to succulent, depending on their proximity to the rich sauce, and how long they’d been soaking in it. Another highlight — the main draw, really — was that a single order was enough to fill two ravenous freshmen to the point of bursting, at a total cost of about six dollars, including bottomless cups of tea, a sectioned orange, and a pair of stale fortune cookies.

I don’t know how many times I ordered “TWO-SIDE PAN FRIED LO MEIN, CHICKEN!” Maybe half a dozen, total, before the health department shut the place down. I held out hope for the reopening of a newer, more hygienic Ta Chien, but a few months later, the building was gutted by an extremely suspicious fire that put an end to those dreams.

Over the years, I tried to order the dish in many other Chinese restaurants, but never got what I was hoping for. The sauce wasn’t the same. The noodles weren’t crispy. Most of the time, the waiter wouldn’t even understand the words that were coming out of my mouth. Saying them louder never seemed to help.

It never occurred to me to try to cook the dish myself. Chinese cooking always intimidated me. There were so many unfamiliar ingredients, so many strange techniques to master.

For nearly thirty years, I lived without the savory thrill of “TWO-SIDE PAN FRIED LO MEIN, CHICKEN!” But then it happened that we hosted a Chinese exchange student, and, in the interest of her happiness, I took it upon myself to learn some basic Chinese cooking. And once I knew my way around a wok, and my pantry was full of obscure sauces and spices, I thought I ought to give it a whirl.

The first challenge was to find a recipe, which meant identifying the dish by a more common name. After a few hours of studying photographs of Chinese dishes on the Internet, I found one that looked a lot like the hallowed food of my memory. It turns out that the Ta Chien’s menu-writer had used a kind of kitchen shorthand for something more properly called “Hong Kong Style Chicken Pan Fried Noodles.”

A trip to our favorite Asian supermarket took care of the daunting list of ingredients, which included parboiled Chinese egg noodles, bok choy, snow peas, baby corn, oyster sauce, light and dark soy sauce, corn starch, rice wine, and sesame oil. The chicken was cooked with the “velveting” technique, which involves marination and then flash-frying before the final assembly and saucing of the chicken and vegetables. Then there was the matter of sautéing the nest of egg noodles separately in peanut oil.

I’m not exactly a master chef, and the result, while delicious, was merely an approximation of the heavenly lo mein of memory.

Nevertheless, my home-cooked “TWO-SIDE PAN FRIED LO MEIN, CHICKEN!” has become our daughter’s favorite food. She’s learning how to cook it herself. That way, she’ll never have to suffer long, lonely decades without it.