Hong Kong Chicken Biscuit

Hong Kong Chicken Biscuit

　　Guangzhou’s famous Chicken Biscuit, originally named “Xiaofeng Biscuit,” is said to have been created by a female worker named Xiaofeng from a wealthy Wu family in Guangzhou’s Xiguan district during the Xianfeng era of the Qing Dynasty. It only became a renowned biscuit half a century later when the Chengzhu Teahouse in Guangzhou’s Henan district, facing unsold Mid-Autumn mooncakes, had its pastry chefs improvise by using mooncake ingredients prepared in the style of Xiaofeng Biscuit, and boldly mixing crushed mooncakes with pork and Chinese flowering cabbage as filling. They then seasoned it with red fermented tofu, minced garlic, pepper, five-spice powder, and salt, creating a new variety called “Chengzhu Xiaofeng Biscuit” that was sweet with a salty tang, fragrant and crispy. Its unique flavor won customers over. The biscuit’s shape resembled a chick, so it also became known as Chicken Biscuit. Later, it was further refined with meticulous craftsmanship, improved packaging in cans or boxes, and exported as far as Southeast Asia.

　　The Chicken Biscuit, renowned both in China and abroad and highly favored by the people of Guangzhou, came about entirely by accident—a happy coincidence. This shows that the development of human culinary culture, like the development of anything else, is a unity of inevitability and chance. Every accidental phenomenon in food culture contains certain inevitable trends in its evolution, and Lingnan cuisine is no exception. Transforming mooncake ingredients into Chicken Biscuit, this chance event reflects the inevitable role of innovation and creativity as the inner drive behind the progress of food culture.