Whatever (most) Westerners might think, chicken's feet are much prized by (most) Chinese people as a dish. The restaurant name is 凤爪 ( / 鳳爪) fèngzhǎo, fèngzhuǎ / “phoenix claws”. That’s how fancy they can be.
Anyone who’s had a dim sum meal — with its great array of small dishes, mostly dumplings — will, no doubt, have noticed chicken feet on the menu, in more than one form.
The most common forms are:
- cooked in soya sauce or black bean sauce, or both, with perhaps fresh red chilli and garlic added, usually until they are so soft and tender that the non-bone matter will just melt in the mouth;
- the Thai way: sweet and sour, with fresh red chilli and some pickled vegetable strips (carrot, Chinese radish) added; served cold; the feet are pre-cooked but left crunchy.
For people who want the taste without the work, there’s a deboned version for both. I often imagine a whole battalion of little old ladies deboning the feet, chatting away or even watching telly. (Why old ladies? Good to have something to do while having a chinwag, or something to do at all — old people should feel useful and needed. Exercise for the hands and fingers — if not the feet, haha.)
When a student’s Chinese wife gave birth to their first boy, her mother came over to look after her. She’d cook all sorts of things that are good for a post-natal woman. One of the concoctions was chicken feet (and other things, e.g. peanuts) cooked as a soup. This is to help milk production. Only the liquid will be given to the new mother, and the rest thrown out — all the flavour and nutrients will have been extracted, so they have no value anymore.
Perhaps the health reasoning behind this recipe is the collagen in the chicken feet.
It is also a cultural behaviour thing, I think, as the Chinese love fiddly food: e.g., melon / pumpkin seeds, even sunflower seeds which are much smaller and very fiddly. All in their shell, of course. What’s the point if one cannot have something to keep one’s fingers busy while watching the telly or chatting with friends and family?
When I was a child, if there was a dish which had chicken feet in it, e.g., a whole chicken cooked up as a big pot of soup, the adults would warn the children not to eat the feet. Their explanation was: you’ll end up with your young fingers becoming claw-like, all rigid and twisted, which will affect your handwriting, like the chicken feet scratching away in the soil. I’d then notice the grown-ups tucking into the chicken feet with gusto. Of course they said their fingers were already set for life, whereas our young ones were still growing and taking shape.
I suspect, however, that as there are only two feet per chicken, the grown-ups just wanted to bag the limited-supply treats for themselves.
