Beggar's Chicken

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Beggar's Chicken is a Chinese dish of chicken that is stuffed, wrapped in clay, and slowly baked at low heat. It can take six hours to prepare a single serving.

Video Beggar's Chicken

Origin

As the dish is very popular in China, many regions claim it as traditionally theirs. Most experts agree that the dish originated in Hangzhou. The clay-wrapped, slow cooking method is thousand of years old in China.

Various legends surround the origins of Beggar's Chicken. In one, a beggar stole a chicken from a farm, but having no pot or utensils, improvised a cooking method. He wrapped the bird in lotus leaves and packed clay or mud around it, set it in a hole where he had lit a fire, and buried it to cook it. When he dug up the chicken and cracked open the clay, he found the meat to be tender and aromatic. In other versions, the beggar stole the chicken from the emperor and used the mud-hole method to avoid smoke which might attract the imperial guards; alternatively, the emperor stopped to dine with the beggar and so enjoyed the dish that he added it to the imperial menu, and the beggar prospered by selling it to locals. According to another legend, the dish had been a childhood favorite of Emperor Gaozu of Han, who had been born a peasant, and when he became emperor the recipe became an imperial specialty.

Today, the dish is often wrapped in lotus leaves and sometimes in pastry, though some recipes still call for a covering of non-toxic clay to retain moisture.