Poultry: Chicken & Duck

Chicken or duck is the everyday king of the Chinese table, and lest I ever forget it there was always at least one clucker or quacker strutting and scratching within eye’s distance or earshot when I lived in Taipei. If it wasn’t the family hen, then it was the neighbor’s chickens, the poultry man’s ducks, or a sisterhood of chicks wiggling full tilt down some dirt alleyway after their mother. Peasants on the bus I took to school rode along with live chickens pinned between their knees, the man down the street raised Peking ducks, and Po-fu, the gourmet head of our household, kept me in tow on his regular rounds of the poultry markets looking for the plumpest black chickens—succulent birds with black skin and black bones—that would keep him young and keep me pretty (or so he always said). By the end of my years in Asia, I had a strong appreciation for the everyday grandeur of poultry in the Chinese world and had eaten of it plentifully.