Chicken with Mushrooms

History

Chicken and mushrooms developed as a pairing in Chinese kitchens over centuries, with dried shiitake and wood ear mushrooms prized both for their earthy depth and for their place in traditional medicine. The technique here — slowly braising boned chicken in a fermented soy-based liquid — builds a great deal from very few ingredients through long, low cooking, and the mushrooms earn their keep by holding their texture while soaking up the broth.

The receipt calls its soy sauce "syou," most likely a transliteration of the Japanese *shoyu*, "soy sauce" — a small sign of the route by which the ingredient reached an English-speaking reader. The dish itself is plain: the bird boned, the braise long, the seasoning deep rather than various.

Sara Bosse and Winnifred Eaton, the latter writing under the pen name Onoto Watanna, published the Chinese-Japanese Cook Book in 1914, and chicken with mushrooms sits among dozens of Chinese and Japanese recipes set out for American women cooking at home. The authors met the anti-Chinese sentiment of their moment head-on in the preface, telling the reader: "When it is known how simple and clean are the ingredients used to make up these Oriental dishes, the Westerner will cease to feel that natural repugnance which assails one when about to taste a strange dish of a new and strange land." An earlier version of this note quoted that sentence with a word missing.

What the book does not record is where this particular receipt came from, or whose kitchen it was learned in. The account an earlier version gave — of Ming-dynasty braised poultry, of northern Chinese winter feasts and Lunar New Year tables, and of medieval Japanese brewers refining a Chinese soy paste — we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoonful sweet lard
• 2 pounds chicken
• 1 onion
• 1 pound fresh mushrooms
• 1 tablespoonful syou
• 2 teaspoonfuls salt

Instructions

1. Heat the lard in a pan until boiling hot.
2. Cut up a young chicken and remove all the bones.
3. Lay the chicken pieces in the fat and cook to a golden brown.
4. Mince the onion and add to the pan.
5. Wash and cut up the mushrooms.
6. Add the mushrooms and a tablespoonful of syou to the pan.
7. Cook all slowly for fifteen minutes.