Food

To celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year, which falls on January 28 this year, it's customary to serve dishes believed to bring good luck and fortune. But there is one dish in particular that Kei Lum Chan, co-author of China: The Cookbook, considers especially important for Lunar New Year's Eve: soy sauce chicken.

That offering to the gods is still practiced by some Chinese people today, but Chan notes that a whole chicken boiled in water is typically the vehicle of sacrifice. Soy sauce chicken is a more modern, and infinitely more flavorful, interpretation of that dish. To make it, a whole chicken is first deep-fried until golden, and then poached in a sweetened soy sauce broth spiced with star anise and ginger, resulting in a richly flavorful bird with burnished skin and succulent meat. The broth is then reduced into a thick, sticky sauce.

Chan notes that the sauce turns otherwise bland boiled chicken into a mouth-watering dish—and in turn the chicken enriches the sauce, which can also be spooned over a bowl of rice or longevity-bestowing noodles at any point in the two weeks of celebration that follow the holiday's kick-off feast.