Chinese Chicken Cookbook (eBook)

100 Easy-to-Prepare, Authentic Recipes for the American Table

Eileen Yin-Fei Lo (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2007 | 1. Auflage
256 Seiten
Simon & Schuster (Verlag)
978-1-4165-9593-9 (ISBN)

Infos

In China the chicken represents the phoenix, the mythological bird that rose from its ashes and that symbolizes rebirth and reaffirmation. Because of this deeply held belief, chicken is served at every New Year celebration, every wedding feast, and every birthday dinner. The chicken is honored for its eggs, its meat, and the flavor it provides for stocks and broths. Because of the reverence for this bird, the Chinese prepare chicken in myriad ways. Chicken is steamed, baked, boiled, stir-fried, deep-fried, pan-fried, and roasted. It is served hot, cold, or at room temperature. No part of the chicken is wasted from its bones to its skin to its feet, a Chinese delicacy.

Now, renowned Chinese cooking expert Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, who has been called 'the Marcella Hazan of Chinese cooking' by The New York Times, brings her love of Chinese cooking and traditional Chinese chicken recipes to American home cooks in The Chinese Chicken Cookbook.

The Chinese Chicken Cookbook brings together more than one hundred of the best traditional and modern chicken recipes of China from simple stir-fries to more elaborate celebration dishes. In chapters that pair chicken with noodles and rice and in chapters on soup, preparing chicken in the wok, and cooking it whole, readers will find dozens of delicious, easy-to-prepare delicacies. Recipes such as Two-Sesame Chicken, Hot and Sour Soup, Ginger Noodles with Chicken, Chicken Water Dumplings, Chicken Stir-Fried with Broccoli, Mu Shu Chicken with Bok Bang, Mah-Jongg Chicken, and Asparagus Wrapped in Minced Chicken offer new and flavorful ways to prepare chicken whether you're making a quick weeknight meal or having dinner guests on a Saturday night.

Although these recipes use ingredients that home chefs can find in the international section of a well-stocked supermarket or on the Internet, Lo includes the Chinese names for ingredients and recipes, rendered in beautiful Chinese calligraphic characters. Not only decorative, these characters can help you locate unfamiliar ingredients in a Chinese market. The Chinese Chicken Cookbook also has sections on how to select and clean a chicken, a detailed explanation of Chinese ingredients, suggested equipment (including how to properly season a wok), and how to cook a perfect pot of rice.

With wonderful family stories from the author's childhood in China, The Chinese Chicken Cookbook is not just a cookbook for your cookbook library, it is a source of culinary inspiration.

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Renowned Chinese cooking expert and IACP Award–winning author, Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, who has been called "e;the Marcella Hazan of Chinese cooking,"e; brings American home cooks more than 100 recipes for the versatile chicken, from simple stir-fries to celebration dishes.In China the chicken represents the phoenix, the mythological bird that rose from its ashes and that symbolizes rebirth and reaffirmation. Because of this deeply held belief, chicken is served at every New Year celebration, every wedding feast, and every birthday dinner. The chicken is honored for its eggs, its meat, and the flavor it provides for stocks and broths. Because of the reverence for this bird, the Chinese prepare chicken in myriad ways. Chicken is steamed, baked, boiled, stir-fried, deep-fried, pan-fried, and roasted. It is served hot, cold, or at room temperature. No part of the chicken is wasted from its bones to its skin to its feet, a Chinese delicacy. Now, renowned Chinese cooking expert Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, who has been called "e;the Marcella Hazan of Chinese cooking"e; by The New York Times,brings her love of Chinese cooking and traditional Chinese chicken recipes to American home cooks in The Chinese Chicken Cookbook. The Chinese Chicken Cookbook brings together more than one hundred of the best traditional and modern chicken recipes of China from simple stir-fries to more elaborate celebration dishes. In chapters that pair chicken with noodles and rice and in chapters on soup, preparing chicken in the wok, and cooking it whole, readers will find dozens of delicious, easy-to-prepare delicacies. Recipes such as Two-Sesame Chicken, Hot and Sour Soup, Ginger Noodles with Chicken, Chicken Water Dumplings, Chicken Stir-Fried with Broccoli, Mu Shu Chicken with Bok Bang, Mah-Jongg Chicken, and Asparagus Wrapped in Minced Chicken offer new and flavorful ways to prepare chicken whether you're making a quick weeknight meal or having dinner guests on a Saturday night. Although these recipes use ingredients that home chefs can find in the international section of a well-stocked supermarket or on the Internet, Lo includes the Chinese names for ingredients and recipes, rendered in beautiful Chinese calligraphic characters. Not only decorative, these characters can help you locate unfamiliar ingredients in a Chinese market. The Chinese Chicken Cookbook also has sections on how to select and clean a chicken, a detailed explanation of Chinese ingredients, suggested equipment (including how to properly season a wok), and how to cook a perfect pot of rice. With wonderful family stories from the author's childhood in China, The Chinese Chicken Cookbook is not just a cookbook for your cookbook library, it is a source of culinary inspiration.

Textauszug

Introduction

Chicken at the Chinese Table

Mythology of the Phoenix

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 beggar's 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...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.11.2007
• Illustrationen: San Yan Wong
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Essen / Trinken ► Grundkochbücher
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Essen / Trinken ► Länderküchen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Essen / Trinken ► Themenkochbücher
• ISBN-10: 1-4165-9593-7 / 1416595937
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-9593-9 / 9781416595939