Cold noodles with sesame sauce was cutting-edge Chinese in 1969, and New York City’s food adventurers were going to Chinatown to eat them at Hwa Yuan Szechuan Inn at 40 East Broadway, one of Chinatown’s first Szechuan restaurants. It was opened by Chef “Shorty” Tang, who became famous for the dish. Tragically, Shorty died in 1971. His family carried on for nearly a decade without him, but to their credit, the food remained as good as it was when Shorty was alive, and Shorty’s reputation continued to grow. In 1977, Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder, in their Underground Gourmet guide to New York City, note that Shorty “is reputed to be the culinary teacher of almost every Szechuan chef in town.” They seemed not to know that he had been dead for six years.

The noodles were, in fact, just one among many other more ambitious and totally exotic Szechuan delights that Shorty would no doubt have preferred to be remembered by. I was a poor newlywed at the time he opened and remember frequenting the restaurant for a few other things—somehow braised duck sticks in my memory. Besides serving food that was breathtakingly spicy, the complete opposite of the subtle, if not downright bland, Cantonese-style cooking that ruled the day, Hwa Yuan was affordable.

Cold noodles with sesame sauce is very much part of New York City today. Every so-called salad bar has them. Every Chinese take-out menu lists them. Hardly anyone still associates it with the rage for hot and spicy Hunan-Szechuan cooking that was so popular in the 1970s. Indeed, it doesn’t even have the pepper bite that it had when it was introduced back then. The following recipe suggests a range of pepper to suit your taste.