Three Cup Chicken

Three cup chicken takes chopped three-yellow chicken in a clay pot and simmers it with one cup each of sweet rice wine, soy sauce and lard (or tea-seed oil), with no added water, reducing the sauce over gentle heat to a glossy red-brown dish of pure, intense flavour.

Folklore traces the dish to Ningdu in Jiangxi: in the late Southern Song the patriot Wen Tianxiang was captured and passed through Ningdu, where grateful locals stewed a chicken for him with "three cups" of seasoning, giving the dish its name; it later spread to Taiwan and elsewhere in varied styles, a classic of Gan cuisine ranked among the ten great Jiangxi dishes of "Chinese Cuisine."

Brought to table in its clay pot, the chicken is tender and deeply flavoured with a thick sauce that sits perfectly on rice, a signature dish of Jiangxi family banquets and Gan-cuisine restaurants; the Taiwanese style adds basil and sesame oil for a different character.

The equal "three cups" of seasoning, the old clay-pot method with not a drop of water, the glossy red-brown look, and the legend of Wen Tianxiang are the marks of three cup chicken.