The Beggar's Chicken.

I accompanied a friend, who had a sudden urge, to a restaurant at the remote end of a small town bordering the jungle. This friend of mine yearned for the taste of wild-life....and it seems to me he wanted to boost his libido.

The restaurant serves games such as wild boar....snakes....sang kancil (deer)........ant- eaters........iguana (monitor lizard)....monkeys and animals that are caught by the aborigines.

We ordered Curry Wild boar and Claypot iguana. .......and the soup of the day - Snake’s Skin.............I ate just the curry wild boar ..............and left the rest to my friend............he ate whole heartily ...the herbal concoction of iguana and drank the snake soup....
...we washed it down with ‘toddy’...a strong alcoholic brew made from the sugary liquid discharge from the young shoot of the coconut.

The patrons of the table next to us had beggar’s chicken ..........

The Beggar’s chicken is a closely guarded ancient recipe born out of necessity....and ingenuity of a group of desperately hungry ‘street people’..... These people stuffed the chicken with a combination of herbs discarded from the herbal shop.....then wrapped with a large banyan/bamboo leaves and pasted it with clay to be baked over an open fire.

This slow cooking process retains all the nutrients and goodness which would have been otherwise destroyed by heat......and together with the nutritional properties of the herbs it protected the vagrants from succumbing to pneumonia.... in the harshness of the weather.

Today...this herbal preparation became one of the grand ancient Chinese cuisines passed down from the ancestry of the vagrants to their descendants who became restaurateurs and practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine.

There are many variations of the beggar’s chicken....and copycats.....only the connoisseurs can tell the difference.............I can.

>> feast your eyes on it......seeing is believing.


Put the journal up a day earlier because I am attending a wedding banquet tomorrow evening...25th-10-09..............and seriously I have too many dinners... at least one almost every other week...and I cannot stand-down on the invitations because...I love socializing and the food............hoping that they serve beggar’s chicken tomorrow.