Cultural Recipes: Chinese Soy Sauce Chicken cooked Western-style

Friends gather for dinner at Moya, an Eastern European restaurant in Oxford, all British but from an international background. Stories flow and talk turns to favourite foods from home. Cross-cultural advocate and author, Yang-May Ooi, invites you to listen in on the conversation round that table as her friends ask her what is her favourite food from home that she loves to cook. 

Previously, East German Hanna* talked about plum dumplings from her childhood – read her story in The Journey of East German Dumplings: A Personal Story. 

And Oxford local Laura* surprised everyone with her favourite dish and family history – see It’s Easy to Stereotype.

An Eastern Dish Cooked Western-style

Hanna and Laura turned to me after sharing their stories. Hanna said, “What do you love to cook?”

“Well, I don’t really love cooking,” I laughed. “But I do love eating!”

One of my favourite childhood dishes from Malaysia is Soy Sauce Chicken. It’s a simple recipe with simple ingredients – thick soy sauce (kicap manis), thin soy sauce, ginger, garlic, ginger wine and chicken. The method is simple, too, if you have the patience to chop up the chicken into bite-sized pieces, slice the ginger and garlic and then stand at the hob with a big wok and fry it all up. 

“I’m lazy,” I said. “And I also don’t like the smell of frying that sticks to your clothes and hair and linger throughout the house. So I have adapted the recipe to cook it Western-style.”

Easy cooking

I can just about manage to slice the ginger. I often omit the garlic as its pungent smell on your breath and skin after any meal can be a little anti-social. I don’t bother chopping up the chicken but use chicken thighs with the skin on instead. 

“I mix the chicken and all the ingredients in a casserole pot with a little bit of oil, stick it in the oven with the lid on and walk away. After 45 minutes or so, I take the lid off and let the chicken brown for about 20 minutes. I check it’s all cooked and voila – there it is, my signature Soy Sauce Chicken. Very tasty and so easy.”

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Friendship and Family

It’s a taste that reminds me of lunch when I was a child round the big dining table in my family home in Kuala Lumpur. There’s my mum and siblings, Grandmother Ooi and my Aunty Diana – and my Dad if it’s a Saturday and he is home from work. The ceiling fan keeps us cool in the muggy heat. The thin slices of chicken are slightly caramelly from the frying wok. The treacly, gingery soy sauce soaks into our plates of steaming white rice. We scoop stir-fried greens, spicy with chilli, from the big bowl in the middle of table. 

And it also reminds me of countless dinner parties with my English and international friends over the decades here in the UK. I have cooked and served this dish to everyone I know. 

The bubbling mixture is rich and dark as I bring the casserole pot straight from the oven to the table. Its gingery aroma stirs up everyone’s appetite. I serve freshly cooked rice from the rice cooker pot and people pass round broccoli or other green veg. We enjoy it and also forget about it because while it looks impressively Asian, it is also very simple. The food is not the focus – but rather it is there to serve the real business of the meal: talking, laughing and appreciating each other’s company. 

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*names changed for privacy

Ref: moay

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