Chicken Feet (鳳爪)

Chicken feet is one of the most iconic dishes on a dim sum menu, and it is the one that separates the curious eaters from the cautious ones. The feet arrive in a small steamer basket, dark and glossy from their black bean sauce, puffy and wrinkled from their journey through four separate cooking stages, with peanuts that have soaked up the sauce and a few slices of chili pepper on top.

The texture is the point. Chicken feet are almost entirely skin, cartilage, and tendons over small bones. There is no muscle meat to speak of. What you eat is the collagen-rich skin, which after being parboiled, deep-fried, shocked in ice water, braised, and steamed becomes soft, gelatinous, and almost impossibly tender. The deep-frying step is what creates the puffy, wrinkled texture: the hot oil blisters the skin, and the subsequent ice bath causes it to contract and wrinkle. This wrinkling creates pockets that absorb the braising sauce.

Eating chicken feet is a technique in itself. You bite off a toe, work the skin and tendons off the bone with your teeth, and set the bone aside. It is not fast food. It is a slow, tactile, rewarding kind of eating, the kind that requires a pot of tea and no particular hurry. The collagen in chicken feet is the same substance that gives bone broth its body, and in traditional Chinese medicine, chicken feet are considered nourishing to the skin, joints, and connective tissue.