-What does chicken rice tell us about culture today

-What have we lost and what have we gained

-Chicken rice fills my childhood memories and makes new ones

-Why rare food is tasty

-What “common sense” cooking tells us about “cultural appropriation” (or why you can’t find Hainanese Chicken Rice in Hainan). 

Sic Fan Sic Fan (looor)  [Singa-lish]

Kai Fan Kai Fan !

My Mum hollers 

Eat. It’s chicken rice. 

Calling out the dish to be served is superfluous.  A gentle aroma of sweet chicken smells have been wafting for some time.

I’ve already stolen a selection of the best pieces from the kitchen. 

Namely

a small sprinkle of crispy chicken fat crackles

the backbone of the chicken

Gloopy knuckles and scraped jellied bits

Many western friends don’t understand the joy of these edibles. The joy arises from a mix of cultural, texture and flavour. 

The stories I was told in my youth emphasised the value of rare items. In ancient China, meat was relatively rare and reserved for the wealthy and elite. One of the first food stories I was told was how elite Chinese would only eat fish cheeks when presented with a fish and that’s how kidnappers distinguished between valuable kidnapees and less valuable. 

There is only ever a small amount of crispy fat left.  There is little meat on the backbone. That makes them rare and enticing. 

I value texture. Crispy skin, gelatinous cartilage or the smoothness of backbone skin and meat. Many Asian eaters overweight texture vs modern western eaters who’ve not been brought up eating food for the pleasure of texture.

The dish is presented in three essential parts: Rice, Chicken and Soup. 

Condiments and sauces essential accompaniments.

The use of the chicken infuses all three parts.

Today, western cooks speak of “nose-to-tail” eating and throughout history when food was scarce all human cultures minimised food waste.  Fat, proteins, bones and marrow, all sources of high energy and useful minerals. 

This kind of eating speaks to an older, slower time. Not so long ago in human history, only a few decades, but signalling now a richer, wealthier faster time. 

When I eat such complete nose-to-tail food a part of me is sensitive to this cultural history, and to the sustainability implications of limited food waste. Fans of nose-to-tail food instinctively understand this. 

There is an intellectual and visceral satisfaction knowing an important ingredient threads throughout the meal. 

The rice is soft and rich with chicken essence. 

The chicken is delicate and what my Mum would call “waat” - Smooth textured. ["waat" (滑) smooth, moist & slippery, like the belly or collars of freshly steamed fish or steamed chicken's feet.]

The soup is refreshing and cleansing. 

The condiments when required are sweet, salty, ginger-spiced, savoury (umami), garlicky and chili-hot.  All the flavours in any combination you might like. 

A meal in itself - and we don’t really serve desserts.  Maybe a piece of fruit - but no heavy sweet stodge needed to fill you up. The meal is complete in itself. 

While this dish is famous in stalls and restaurants around east Asia, you can find its match or even better at home - well - at least in my Mum’s home. 

This is how she cooks the dish. 

Choose your chicken well. 

In London, this would be a corn fed chicken or this sweet fat Yorkshire chicken we’ve found from our favourite butcher.

In Hainan, China, this would be the specific chicken of the area.  A particular type of breed and bird. The chicken is used in Wen Chang chicken (one of the four traditional dishes of Hainan). Local farmers would let this chicken roam free where the birds typically ate a lot of coconuts - Hainan being famous for its coconut trees - this gave the chickens seemingly two properties: the smooth waat texture when poached properly and the delicate flavour.

My Mum calls this type of chicken a “Kampong” chicken or village chicken, one that gets to roam around (truly ranging free) and eat wild and forage to supplement its meals. 

Wherever you live would change the chicken used depending on what you can find. 

Despite the name of the dish, there is no original “Hainanese chicken rice" in Hainan. The immigrants from Hainan, as they moved to south east Asia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and beyond had to make do with what they had to hand. The dish was brought back to Hainan island from SE Asia. Food travels like that, think of dishes with chili or potatoes both originating in the Americas.

Traditional techniques, local sourcing, and an evolving palette still mindful of food waste - still conscious of serving rich seeming food while keeping a traditional broth as well. 

No wonder Malaysia and Singapore both claim to have invented the dish. The techniques and ideas naturally flow from those immigrants, to the stalls and homes of Malaysia and Singapore and to my Mum and from my Mum to me, in London.

We have no hope of finding a Hainanese chicken either but I remember in my early childhood the discovery of corn fed chicken (about 40 years ago, these first came from France) and how it lifted an already amazing dish to a richer, subtler more savoury version. 

We experiment with other chickens from time to time although it can knock off the well timed poaching, butin our part of the world, corn fed chicken yields the best results. Our high quality chicken is potentially a reason why my Mum’s version can rival the Singapore hawker stall.  

In my Dad’s foodie home town of Ipoh, Malaysia, in my youth, we bought a live chicken at the market. We avoided the premium virgin chicken (more expensive, no difference in flavour). I was shown how to catch, kill, drain the blood, guts, de-feather and hang the bird. I helped. It seemed important to understand how the chicken was reaching my plate and why it was respectful to limit the waste from this process. 

The wet markets are dying out. This is mostly because modern supermarkets are cheaper, more convenient and hygienic. The increasingly intense farming and dense concentration of live animals in a wet market is a breeding ground for virus transmission to humans. The 2019 COVID-19 virus outbreak is a reminder of how humans are susceptible. There is a part of me that will miss these markets. Some of them will transform to tourist bazaars and the live animals will disappear but I will remember the noise and even the smells. Those wet markets reach back to a less industrial time, perhaps to a time when we cared for our animals more than now, as they were more precious for both protein and labour. I will always remember my father’s sister walking through a particularly rank ammonic smelling part of the market without a care. Only much later did I find out she had a diminished sense of smell, which might also have explained a love of chili spice.

We don’t kill chickens in London but for every chicken I buy, I will reach into the chicken’s entire body hoping to pull out some gobbets of chicken fat.

These pieces of fat, my we will slow fry in the pan creating chicken oil to pre-cook the rice in.

The leftover crackles become the rare pre-course snack for me. My Mum would keep the crackles wrapped up and, like a secretive squirrel, hand them to me like a precious code. Now she does the same for my son, who instinctively knows a rare treat when he spies one.

Thus this tiny piece of food culture passes to another generation. We cup it in our hands and value these rare morsels.

Like households all over SE Asia, we discuss where the best food can be bought or eaten. These discussions unpick individual dishes or ingredients or even individual parts of dishes.

The light soy made by a small producer in Ipoh, the barbecue pork from a particular stall in a food court in Kuala Lumpur, where the freshest pomfret can be found and, of course, where you might eat the best chicken rice in Singapore, or the world.

My British born and bred wife never fully understood this obsession until a journey with me back to Malaysia and Singapore. She heard the never ending back and forth between my Mum and I over individual dishes comparing them to dishes in the past and where we might eat them in the future. How our favoured roast duck has waxed and waned with the chefs at various restaurants. In Singapore, and especially in Ipoh, she finally understood that this talk is ingrained into our culture. Our debates on food are one of the saving connections between my Mum and me. Stretching back through time and transcending the banal family arguments which mums and sons have.

Here we may talk about whether a dish has “standard” and compare to all the other master dishes and variants we have eaten. Here too, when a person dislikes the fascinating textures of jellyfish or chicken’s feet or pork knuckle, we don’t say “she doesn’t like jellyfish” we say “she hasn’t learned to eat jelly fish”. It cannot be that jelly fish itself is untasty, it’s simply that a person hasn’t experienced the cultural and taste history to appreciate the jellyfish.

Fuschia Dunlop, one of my favourite food writers, and one of the greatest modern writers on Chinese food has spoken of bringing some of the best Chinese chefs to one of the most lauded modern American restaurants in the world (The French Laundry). They found much of the food difficult to eat. One commented that they could not even tell whether the food was brilliant or not. The dishes were too far outside their taste and food history.

To poach the chicken

There are various methods used. The idea is to poach the chicken gently so that it cooks but the meat doesn’t harden and keeps a waat texture.  The water stays at 70c to 90c and the water becomes stock used to cook the rice. 

This is related to sous-vide techniques today as protein is cooked (and germs killed) at 70c but the hardening caused by 100c+ temperatures are avoided. 

The size and type of your chicken, your pot, whether you left the chicken at room temperature or fridge cold all impact this technique.

The core technique would be:

Boil fresh water in a pot that will easily hold the chicken. As soon as the water boils switch the heat off and lower the entire chicken into the pot so that it is fully covered.  Then cover with a tight lid and let the chicken poach for 30 minutes. 

My Mum will also make sure there are no feathers left on the chicken and it’s been cleaned well. I know some who give it a salt rub exfoliation and add ginger and spring onions to the cavity in the poach. 

After 30 minutes carefully lift the chicken out. My mum uses a wooden spoon in the cavity. You can temperature test the chicken to ensure that it reads >70c and preferably still below 80c. 

Some people use an ice bath to stop the cooking dead. But we tend to let the chicken rest slowly (and thus we have a wider window for the poach as it continues to cook and relax out of the water.)

Two extra points to note. Scummy foam might arise in the initial poach, skim and remove this if it occurs. If you are worried about under cooking the chicken you can have a very gentle heat under the water to keep the temperature up but try not to let the water boil. 

The stock water you will need for the soup and cooking the rice.

Choose the rice

Not American, Japanese, Basmati, Italian or Persian rices. These all fail for various reasons.

We suggest Thai rice, although I’m sure rice from China is fine too.

The condiments will have their own section later, but shallots, ginger, possibly butter and cucumber, spring onion / scallions are the only necessary ingredients. We add tomatoes and coriander as well.

10 small shallots

5 cloves of garlic

3 coin slices of ginger

To fry the rice

Cut peeled shallots and garlic into fine strips and slices.

Slice 3 coins worth of ginger and crush.

Wash the rice in several changes of water (this removes a layer of dust and starch) and drain dry.

Heat wok/pan with the chicken fat oil (made earlier). You will likely need to add more unflavoured oil (ie not olive, or butter)  to reach about half a cup or enough that all the rice can be coated and absorb some of this oil.

Add sliced shallots and garlic and cook to soft and lightly golden. 

Add the slices of ginger.

Add in the rice and fry together. Depending on how rich you want the rice you can add a chicken stock cube and butter. If you happened to have had a large amount of chicken fat earlier, you may not want as much.

This technique has a commonality with the Italian risottos in that the rice partly absorbs the flavour from the frying - that’s why chicken fat emphasises the flavour.

After about 4 to 7 minutes of frying so that the rice is well coated and you can see it has partly absorbed the oils, you can stop and transfer to a rice cooker or pot and use the chicken stock to cook the rice. 

Use your favoured method. We tend to put the rice in a rice cooker and add stock until it’s about 2cm covered over the rice. 

Soup

The soup is the leftover chicken cooking water.  If you feel it’s too thin you can add chicken carcasses, bones and other spare chicken bits then simmer. Chicken bones I’ve collected and frozen previously may get thrown in and the soup gently simmered (any scum removed). Any leftover soup makes an amazing base for a wide range of meals. 

Sliced spring onions / scallions and fried shallots are typically the small garnish added when the soup is served. 

The Condiments 

….(to be continued…)