Drunken Chicken

Drunken chicken (zuiji) is one of the cold-dish starters of the Shanghai and Jiangnan tradition, a preparation that is at once simple in concept and demanding in execution. The chicken must be perfectly cooked — moist, just past pink at the bone — and the wine marinade calibrated precisely to flavour without overpowering.

The preparation begins with a whole chicken (or specifically the drumstick-and-thigh section, which has better flavour than the breast for this application). The chicken is steamed gently over simmering water rather than boiled — steaming preserves more of the chicken's own flavour and prevents the meat from becoming tough through violent agitation. The steamed chicken is removed, allowed to cool slightly, and then deboned and shaped: the deboned leg meat is rolled into a tight cylinder, wrapped in cling film or clean cloth, and refrigerated to set the shape. This rolled form makes slicing clean and uniform.

The marinade is made from Shaoxing Huadiao wine (the aged variety, darker and more complex than the cooking wine), light soy sauce, salt, ginger, scallion, a small number of dried goji berries, and sometimes a pinch of sugar. The rolled chicken is submerged in this brine in a sealed container and refrigerated for at least 12 hours, ideally 24 to 48. During this time the wine flavour permeates the meat completely and the colour shifts from white to pale amber-gold.

At service, the cylinder is unwrapped and sliced crosswise into rounds approximately two centimetres thick. The concentric rings of the rolled meat are revealed in each slice. The rounds are arranged on a plate, usually on a bed of shredded ginger or garnished with scallion threads, and served cold with a small dish of the strained marinade for dipping.

The flavour is subtle: Shaoxing wine is not aggressively alcoholic in the finished dish but leaves a fragrant, slightly sweet, fermented depth. The chicken should be moist. This is a restrained dish; the Jiangnan palate is considerably more measured in seasoning than Sichuan or Hunan cooking, and drunken chicken exemplifies that approach.