Comfort and History in Chicken Chop
By Annie Hariharan
Hainanese chicken chop is a piece of crumbed chicken, grilled or fried and served with brown gravy, vegetables and potatoes. For many Malaysians, it’s a comfort dish tinged with nostalgia. Photo by Mervyn Lee.
Growing up in Malaysia, food blogger Charmaine Ferrara’s first exposure to “Western” food was chicken chop.
“We used to live close to a food court with lots of stalls selling local food,” she says. “One of those stalls sold ‘Western” food and I remember always asking for chicken chop. It was just something different for a change. It was either that or fish and chips.”
Malaysia is a former British colony so Western is often synonymous with English, but this “Western” dish does not exist in England or other European countries. Instead, it is a Malaysian innovation by Hainanese migrants who combined local taste, British colonial taste and new cooking techniques in the early 1900s.
Hainanese chicken chop is a piece of crumbed chicken, grilled or fried and served with brown gravy, vegetables and potatoes. For many Malaysians, it’s a comfort dish tinged with nostalgia.
It is also clearly different from other Malaysian food for a few reasons. Firstly, it has a meat as a main dish in a country where rice or noodles were often center stage and meat was eaten sparingly.
Secondly, it featured a healthy serving of gravy rather than dipping sauce, soup or curry which is more prevalent in the local cuisine. It is clearly different, yet it is not ‘othered’ because it coexists with other local dishes in hawker stalls. Chicken schnitzel or chicken parmigiana are its closest cousins although there are notable differences in the toppings, side dishes and gravy.
“I lived in the U.S. for 15 years, and the closest comparison is maybe chicken fried steak because it is also a type of breaded chicken,” Ferrara says. “But chicken fried steak has a white, creamy gravy and chicken chop has a brown, savory-tasting gravy.”
The gravy is the key and she experimented with different recipes and finally landed on one that suits her taste. The technique is similar to a roux and the ingredients include Lea and Perrins’ Worcestershire sauce and soy sauce.
“I also include black pepper as well as tomato for some tang and serve it with green peas and French fries,” she explains.
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It is important to note that Hainanese chicken chop is also a popular “Western” dish in Singapore, with the same origin story and nostalgic tinge. It harks back to the time when Malaysia and Singapore had shared trade, family and colonial history.
Jimmy Wong, a Singaporean food photographer and cook, associates chicken chop with a childhood treat.
“Growing up, Asian food was everyday food but chicken chop was special, almost chichi,” he says. “I was always fascinated by the Western section of food courts, which sold chicken chop. As an adult, I know it is a very simple, maybe even basic, dish, but it still represents a time and place for me.”
He also remembers eating at Coliseum Café in Kuala Lumpur in his younger days, which is a legendary Malaysian-British-Hainanese institution famed for its chicken chop. It opened in 1921 and used to be a favorite hangout of the British colonials who wanted Western food. It then became a local joint for people who have limited to no memory of pre-independent era.
“I remember the white tablecloth, the waiters and the ambience. I can’t explain it, but it felt aspirational. Now it feels bit silly to think like that,” Wong muses
Wong cook believes that chicken chop is one of the few dishes that represents Malaysia and Singapore’s cuisine.
“It’s not as if the Hainanese community replicated a famous dish from Britain,” Wong says. “They created something completely new. It’s like eating a piece of history.”
Wong now lives in Australia and has since refined his own recipe for chicken chop. His version of the gravy incudes dark soy sauce, chicken bouillon, butter, flour and store-bought gravlax to create that savory flavor. With this list of ingredients, it’s clear that chicken chop is a fusion dish, long before we used the word fusion to describe food. And like many fusion dishes, it is the byproduct of trade, colonization, migration and experimentation.
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Chinese migration to Malaysia (then known as Malaya) happened in waves dating back to the 1500s. But the mass migration started from the early 1800s, particularly by people in the Fujian and Guangdong provinces in southeast China who wanted to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Malaysia was part of the British colony, the resource industry was booming and needed bodies. But by the time the Hainanese community migrated from Hainan island to Malaya in the 1930s, they found that other Chinese communities already had a stronghold in labor-intensive industries such as construction and mining.
So, the Hainanese people focused on service-based industries instead. They first became cooks in newly opened hotels, in the homes of nouveau-rich Chinese merchants and British colonists. Then they opened coffee shops to cater to the changing taste of the local population. This skill-based specialization still has its marks in the Malaysian Chinese cuisine. Food with the Hainanese prefix is almost a codified way of saying “quality”: Hainanese chicken rice, Hainanese chicken chop, Hainanese noodles, Hainanese kaya toast and Hainanese coffee. It has an innovative quality to it, where cooks combined skills with a new range of ingredients, and voila, they created something new.
In some senses, Hainanese food remains one of the things that has transcended generations for the community. The physical reminders, be it a village or language is fading. There used to be a Hainanese village, Kampung Hailam, about 125 miles from the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, but in 2017 developers tore it down to make way for a new development. Forty families were served with eviction notice, and houses were razed.
Hainanese language is also not widely spoken in Malaysia compared to other Chinese languages such as Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien and Hakka. Even those with Hainanese background adapted to the prevailing dialects or languages in a town. They spoke Hainanese at home, until they didn’t.
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Mervyn Lee’s grandfather, Lee Tai Yik is one of those who migrated from Hainan to Malaysia in the early 1900s. He got his start by working as a cook for an influential Chinese-born businessman and tin mine owner before pioneering the restaurant Yut Kee in Kuala Lumpur in 1928. The restaurant is another famed Malaysian-Hainanese institution and known for its chicken chop as well as a breakfast of coffee, half-boiled eggs and kaya toast.
Lee has since joined the family business and tries to explain the enduring appeal of chicken chop.
“As a child, rice was a staple, so Western food was a treat,” he says. “We only had burgers and fast-food chains from the 1980s onwards. Before that, there was only chicken chop.”
The chicken chop in Yut Kee comes with mixed peas and carrots as well as fried potatoes. The gravy, which is the component that makes or breaks the dish includes Worcestershire sauce and soy sauce as Ferrara also mentioned. This is what makes it a standout and links it back to British influence.
Lee is unabashed about his praise for Worcestershire sauce.
“It’s like the miracle sauce!” he says. “It works with a lot of things: noodles, stews and broths. We use it in our marinades, gravy as well as in our minced pork bread. Initially, I didn’t even know how to pronounce it. I called it Wooster-shy-er. My older customers don’t know how to pronounce it either. They just refer to it as the Mat Salleh soy sauce,” aka white people’s soy sauce.
But Worcestershire sauce is not similar to soy sauce, which Lee is keen to stress.
“It has that salty, sour flavor profile which we now know is umami. It’s in a league of its own, just like Maggi seasoning is in a league of its own.”
Soon-Tzu Speechley, a Malaysian architectural historian adds more context about Worcestershire sauce.
“It is really an outlier in British food because of that fermented taste,” he says. “But it is now a feature in many Asian dishes, influenced by the British trade back in the day. For example, in Japanese cuisine, it is used in takoyaki sauce. It’s all part of food adaptation and innovation.”
There’s a reason why Worcestershire sauce etched its way into the food of countries that British colonized or traded with. Lea and Perrins expanded by convincing stewards on British passenger ships to include it on their dining table set-ups. It soon became a British staple and was synonymous with steak sauce. Part of its myth is that the company has not released the full recipe. What we do know is that it is a vinegar base, flavored with anchovies, tamarind, onion and garlic, among other ingredients.
In Mexico, Worcestershire sauce has taken on a new life as customers use it as pizza topping and seafood seasoning, among others. Local producers have also started making it with uniquely Mexican flavors including chiles and mezcal vinegar.
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There’s still the question of consuming food with obvious colonial overtures. Do people feel differently as they eat it now, knowing what we know about the politics of food and asymmetrical power?
“Yes, Hainanese chicken chop is a product of colonialization,” says Speechley. “But I think it has less to do with the British and more to do with Hainanese innovation and ingenuity. By now, middle class Malaysians have a global palate and we can access a range of Western food so chicken chop is a nostalgic, retro dish. I’m curious to see how the new generation will change and adapt it.”
Change and adaption is central to any fusion food, and stories like this challenges our preconceived ideas of food. We have been conditioned to revere family recipes, passed down from generations without modification. We value stories of grandmothers and mothers bending over backwards to collect, pound, grind herbs and spices in their backyard. We mistake labor for love.
Perhaps, the people we should also credit for our food nostalgia are the unnamed innovators. People who did not have a rigid definition of food and were willing to experiment with ingredients out of necessity until it became a canonised dish.
