Chicken rice

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This is the third weekly entry in the Cambridge, MA Companion to Singaporean Food, an ongoing series about all those words I italicize in essays, like lou bak, and rempah, and kopitiam. It’s modeled on one of the most beloved books on my shelf, Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food, a reference text that’s warm, erudite, and opinionated, but also as solid as basalt. The goal is to be more entertaining than wikipedia, but more informative than Tiktok. This series is primarily a benefit for paid subscribers, though I’ve left the first and second entries free to give a sense of what these are like.

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Chicken rice

Also Hainanese chicken rice. 

One of the few dishes commonly attributed to the Hainanese that actually has culinary roots in Hainan. 

Versions of this dish are found from Vietnam to Indonesia, all clearly derivatives of Wenchang chicken rice (Simplified Chinese: 文昌鸡饭 Pinyin: wén chāng jī fàn). The chicken is a product as well as a dish – a specific breed of chicken raised according to particular practices in a defined area. In Europe, it would carry a protected designation of origin. The dish consists of a poached Wenchang chicken, served on the bone, with a sauce of ginger and garlic, alongside rice cooked in the broth. The chicken is frequently served without the rice, in which case it’s simply Wenchang chicken.