Eileen Yin-Fei Lo - Chinese Chicken Cookbook

Also by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo

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The Chinese Banquet Cookbook: Authentic Feasts from Chinas Regions

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Eileen Yin-Fei Los New Cantonese Cooking

From the Earth: Chinese Vegetarian Cooking

The Dim Sum Dumpling Book

The Chinese Way: Healthy Low-Fat Cooking from Chinas Regions

The Chinese Kitchen

SIMON & SCHUSTER
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1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2004 by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarksof Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Designed by Jaime Putorti

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lo, Eileen Yin-Fei.

The Chinese chicken cookbook : more than 100 easy-to-prepare, authentic recipes for the American table / Eileen Yin-Fei Lo ; calligraphy by San Yan Wong.

p. cm.

Inclues index.

ISBN 0-7432-3341-7

1. Cookery (Chicken) 2. Cookery, Chinese. I. Title.

TX 750.5.C45L624 2004

641.665--dc22

2003059042

For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

eISBN-13: 978-1-4165-9593-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-3341-5

www.simonspeakers.com

This book, as always, is dedicated to my family. To my husband, Fred, tireless researcher, taster, and tyrant. To my daughter, Elena, and son Christopher, whose love of food and cooking approaches my own. To my son Stephen, the familys extraordinary eater. Finally, this book belongs as much to my agent, Carla Glasser, as to me; she makes me write, write.

The Chinese Chicken Cookbook

It is believed among the Chinese that many foods are symbolic and are actually metaphors for aspects of life. In Chinese religions, folklore, allegory, and mythology, particular foods often have meanings and significance beyond satisfying hunger. Chicken, historically, is such a food.

To the Chinese the chicken is the embodiment of the phoenix, the mythological bird that rose from its ashes, symbolizing rebirth and reaffirmation. It is also a female symbol and is paired with the dragon, the male symbol, as a recurring image of marriage. Chicken is also believed to be a food that promotes longevity as well as a tonic that possesses recuperative powers (a concept shared with a number of cultures around the world).

As such it is part of every Lunar New Year celebration, every wedding feast, every birth of a child, every birthday and anniversary dinner in China. Chickens are offered whole to ancestors in temples and at graves. The whole chicken suggests that the lives of those departed were felicitous from beginning to end.

The chicken has always been a most honored food in China. It is highly regarded for its eggs, later its meat, still later for the life and flavor it provides for stocks and broths when it becomes too old to produce eggs and too tough to eat. The Chinese even distinguish between a chicken, an old hen, and an old and tough black-boned chicken. Each provides flavor for soup as well as nourishment, but the old hen is deemed better than the chicken, the black-boned chicken better than the old hen. In all of its varieties it is a most useful, necessary, and esteemed bird, one that began its existence as a wild bird and was first domesticated in China thousands of years ago.

The whole chicken is a most versatile ingredient in the Chinese kitchen. The chicken is steamed, boiled, baked, stir-fried, deep-fried, braised, roasted, and barbecued. It is chopped, sliced, ground, and minced and cooked with rice and noodles. Often, in classic and traditional dishes, chicken is cooked using several processes for a single dish. Chicken is the basis for stocks and sauces and is often cooked with other ingredients. It is eaten hot or cold or at temperatures in between, in salads and in stews. Chicken fills baked and steamed buns and breads, is wrapped into dim sum dumplings and pastries, and is the inspiration for sculpted dough dumplings. No part of a chicken is wasted, from the meat and bones to the skin, the fat and the innards, and even the feet, which are a delicacy in China.

It is rare in China to come upon a region, a city, a town or village that does not have its own way of preparing chicken. Indeed, if you ask the chef in any restaurant how chicken is cooked in a particular area, you will be told that it is cooked our way. In Beijing, chicken might be cooked in strips with sauted leeks; in Guangzhou, simmered in soy sauce or roasted to a parchment-like crispness; in Hunan, cooked with chilies and bits of dried tangerine skin. In South China, chicken is often combined with the local tropical fruits; in Shanghai, it might be sweet and oily, or drunken with a marinade of rice wine; in Fujian, chicken is cooked together with rice. In dim sum teahouses it is stuffed into steamed dumplings or even into cakes of bean curd. Chicken might be sliced and ladled into rice congees, and in Hangzhou chicken could come wrapped in clay or pastry in a well-known dish called beggars chicken. The number of chicken recipes is truly infinite.

Chickens, along with pigs, are believed to be the first wild animals to be domesticated. In their wild states, both animals were important foods for the Pei-li-kaang, a prehistoric people who lived in what is now the central valley of the Yangzi River.

The chicken is mentioned as a domesticated bird in the oracle bone writings of the Shang/Yin dynasty, which spanned the period from 1766 to 1122 B.C., and chicken bones have been found in archaeological excavations of that period. It is believed that the chicken became a largely domesticated bird in those Shang years.

Excavations of Han dynasty tombs in Hunan in the last century have yielded much knowledge of the early Chinese kitchen and its foods. In one uncovered tomb, the preserved body of a woman, thought to be the wife of a nobleman, was found along with forty-eight bamboo boxes that have provided food historians with extensive information on Chinese eating and drinking in that 200 B.C. period. More than fifty pottery containers filled with various foods, including chicken, were found in that tomb as well. There were remains and writings about what were initially called bamboo chickens, later black chickens, terms for wild chickens, as well as notes on their domestication.

In another Han dynasty tomb, there are wall drawings of two chickens. In still another there is a detailed wall drawing of a kitchen scene that includes a rack on which hang two chickens.

Among the Han, an important feast always included a chicken dish. At the same time the Han rulers urged rural people to raise chickens, thus making them more accessible and no longer a food available only to nobility. The Han, according to the classic study