Seeking Soy Sauce Chicken

Passport & Plate - Soy Sauce Chicken and Eggs

China | Wednesday, March 4, 2015 | 5 photos

Ingredients
3.5 pounds of chicken legs and thighs
2 c. of soy sauce
3 c. of water
½ c. shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry
½ c. brown sugar or 1/3 c. brown sugar
1 cinnamon stick
3 star anise
1-inch knob of ginger
3 scallions
4 eggs
bunch of cilantro

 

How to prepare this recipe
Pat chicken pieces dry with a paper towel. Chop scallions and slice ginger into coins. Combine with soy sauce, water, rice wine, rock sugar, cinnamon stick, and star anise in a heavy pot with a tight fitting lid (such as a Le Creuset Dutch oven.) Bring to a boil. Add the chicken, cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Baste the chicken once. While it simmers, hard-boil, cool, and peel four eggs. Dunk in the eggs into the sauce, baste the chicken again, and simmer for 15 minutes (the eggs will take on a mahogany hue, a sort of Chinese Easter egg.) The chicken will easily peel off the bone. Serve with steamed rice sprinkled with chopped cilantro.

 

The story behind this recipe
My maternal grandmother was a Chinese cook of the old order. Born in southern China, she raised seven children during the war and could conjure meals from basic ingredients –
bean-thread-noodle soup and glossy steamed white buns – that hailed from the hills green with pine and bamboo and the red earth laced with rivers of Guandong province.

Just once I tried to help her make dumplings. I might have been eight. We mixed together ground pork and chopped vegetables. I spooned a clump of filling into the wrappers and wet the edges, but when I folded the wrappers, the meat—wet and bloody, with a mineral scent —bulged through the seams and onto my fingers. I scampered off to watch afternoon reruns, and never learned how to make that dish or my favorite, soy sauce chicken. Eventually my grandmother moved to southern California to live with my aunt, and my mother—a scientist more comfortable in the lab than in the kitchen—fed us nightly with Whoppers from Burger king and boxes of Tyson’s fried chicken.

Food is culture; food is shorthand for who you are, and though I taught myself how to make seafood paella and crème brûlée, I felt like I’d failed this basic test of cultural identity. Wasn't my birthright a pair of chopsticks in one hand and a wok in the other?

A decade ago, my grandmother passed away without teaching us her recipes. While getting over the flu and craving soy sauce chicken, I searched online. To my surprise, the recipes called for rock sugar and rice wine, which my palate hadn’t distinguished. You can substitute brown sugar and sherry. Haven’t immigrant cooks always made do with what they had on hand in their adopted lands? After simmering the dish, I lifted the cover and steam bathed my face. I took a hesitant first bite: savory with a hint of sweet, of wine’s time and refinement, paired with gamey dark meat, the taste of wildness. Not quite my past but everything my future will be: the culinary traditions I now pass onto my toddler twins every meal.