海南鸡饭

Wenchang Chicken and Hainanese Chicken Rice

After a year in government service, I joined Nestle R&D in Singapore and stayed for 33 years till retirement. I only started teaching in the Food Science and Technology Department at the National University of Singapore after retiring. Nestle is truly a multi-national corporation! There were many nationalities working at the R&D Center. During the initial years, I had many colleagues from Switzerland, where the parent Nestle company is domiciled.

I remember one Swiss colleague distinctly because he always ate Hainanese chicken rice at the nearby hawker centre (food court) for lunch. He declared that it was the best food he had tasted in Singapore, which is quite a compliment to Hainanese chicken rice because Singapore could reasonably be considered a gastronomic delight for its highly accessible food culture at the hawker centre in which several culinary traditions have interacted, influenced one another, and transformed the Singapore eating habit for generations. Some years later, when he visited the R&D Center, he insisted on eating Hainanese chicken rice at that hawker centre!

We first stayed in China 28 years ago. However, we first visited my parents’ village in Wenchang only in 2023 when we came to Hainan for the Qingming Festival. We were warmly welcomed by our relatives and participated fully in the ceremonies. It was also the first time we encountered two distinctive Hainanese traditions! During lunch, we tasted home-cooked Wenchang chicken for the first time, and after lunch, we were driven to a nearby hotel for the compulsory afternoon siesta! The afternoon siesta was most delightful, especially for Mona, but the Wenchang chicken was not at all pleasing. The chicken meat was really tough! Neither of us could bite into it! And we dared not spit it out! To add to our misery, we were told that they had kept the capon (castrated male chicken) running around in the yard for one whole year before slaughtering it! We both did not touch another piece of the chicken dish that afternoon!

A foreigner found Hainanese chicken rice most delightful, and I was not at all pleased with my Wenchang chicken! Are we talking about the same dish that originated in Wenchang, Hainan, and was brought to Singapore by Hainanese immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries? Let’s trace the transformative journey of Wenchang chicken from Hainan to Singapore.

Wenchang chicken has several distinctive characteristics. The chicken is a particular local breed. It is a small fowl with thin skin. It is traditionally raised free-range, and forages among banyan trees and other local vegetation. The texture is firm and chewy, and the distinctive flavour of the meat is preserved by the ‘baiqie’ method of boiling the chicken for a relatively short time. The seasoning used for boiling the chicken is also simple, preserving the meat’s natural flavour. The focus of the dish is the chicken. The rice, which is cooked with chicken stock, is only an accompaniment.

In Hainan, Wenchang chicken is not just a dish but part of a hospitality tradition. The provincial government describes it as an important dish served when people host guests and celebrate occasions. The traditional preparation is the ‘baiqie’ method. The chicken is boiled, cut into pieces, and served with a seasoning mixture. I remember when I was young, my mother used to slaughter an old capon and boil it for the Chinese New Year Eve dinner. I cannot recall the taste, flavour and texture of the dish. I do remember that eating chicken rice balls was the most enjoyable!

Singapore's National Heritage Board explicitly mentioned that Singapore chefs gradually moved from the locally grown, old, tough, chewy, flavourful capon meat to imported, young, tender, succulent, delicate chicken meat, partly due to Cantonese influence and partly because cheap, imported young chicken were readily available commercially. The Cantonese influence is also seen in the preparation method. The young, tender chicken is often gently poached and then handled to preserve moisture and produce a smooth skin. It includes using the Cantonese technique of plunging the cooked chicken into iced water, which helps produce a smoother skin and a gelatinous layer beneath it. You could say the cooks engineered the cooking method around the young, tender chicken used for Singapore’s Hainanese chicken rice.

The contrast does not end here. The rice used is different, and the preparation method is also different. The use of pandan leaves in cooking the rice is influenced by Malay cuisine. Some of the ingredients used to prepare the seasoning mix are also different. In Hainan, the focus is on the chicken; in Singapore, the focus is on the whole serving, including chicken, rice, and seasoning mix!

More importantly, this comparison between Hainan's Wenchang chicken and Singapore's Hainanese chicken rice shows that intangible cultural heritage is not simply preserved; it is transmitted, adapted to its new environment, influenced and transformed, and eventually re-created as a new cultural identity. Hainanese chicken rice is an excellent example of Singapore's intangible cultural heritage, but there is an important distinction: chicken rice itself is not a separate UNESCO-inscribed element. It is one of the food traditions embedded within Singapore's Hawker Centre Culture, which UNESCO inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2020.

Recently, a family from Hainan, comprising 2 sisters and their 3 young children, spent 3 weeks in Singapore and West Malaysia. It was their first visit to both places. They, especially the children, enjoyed the visit so much that they are already planning to visit Singapore and West Malaysia next year. Of course, they did complain that prices in Singapore were so high! However, one complaint from them did catch our attention: “The Hainan chicken rice in Singapore tasted terrible; there is no flavour in the chicken; and the meat disintegrated when you bite into it!”