Beggar’s Chicken-Where it all began!

Kuala Lumpur- the Chinese here, a predominately Cantonese community spend a lot of their pass time dwelling on food preparation. I remembered some 20 years back they made an important find. Beggar's chicken! Today, this dish has become standard offering during most feasts at the restaurant.

It was not until we passed by a restaurant in the Hulu Klang heights the other night and saw the huge crowd there that rekindled some memory. The unique point about this restaurant is- they are the people who popularized the "Beggar's Chicken" dish.!

At that time rumor had it that some workers at a charcoal kiln in Tanjong Sepat conveniently left a chicken inside the furnace to cook while they continued working? The roasted chicken done over the evenly spreaded heat turned out surprisingly well, the rest was history!

That was a long way back and I didn’t have time to follow through their claim. Now it is time and we did! To find out whether the legend really existed.

We started off to Tanjong Sepat, allegedly where such preparation was taking place.

Then there was this area where they have stacked up heaps of woods coming from the valuable Avincienia alba trees. Such evenly prepared logs resembled the appearances of commercially sold charcoal.

The Mangrove swamps are almost deprived of such trees. Consumers have changed over to the cleaner and more convenient LPG gases.

On that day we could still see the remnants of the few kilns that lined the riverside road after the Jugra village. Most of them were very well constructed and appeared to be in good conditions except covered by dilapidated sheds.

Then there was this pair of kilns besides that appeared cleaned and maintained. They laid besides a house occupied by the caretaker of a nearby fishing Pond.

Curiosity drove these guys inside the kiln to get a souvenir shot.

Beneath all the debris, and inside the torn shed, they were charcoal, stacks of wood and this trough with clay.

The clay used were just normal clay, beige -similar to those that we walk on every day.

On the far corners and against the wall there were these heaps of smoldering ashes.

“They have switched their method of preparing charcoal by open burning” remarked Joyce remembering the other type of kilns we saw in Jerantut!

We were fascinated to see charcoal kilns. As far as we know, officially there are only 2 such factories left in the country for the preparation of charcoal. Both of them are in northern Peninsula. On closer examination, the occupants here are preparing Beggar's Chicken. Co-incidentally the fragrances from a nearby kitchen confirmed our surprise finding.

This signboard and the subsequent discussion with the caretakers of the set up confirmed our find.

It was an abrupt but fruitful end to our search! At RM46 for a kilogram chick? That is some price to pay for ambience!