Dry Pot Chicken

If you’ve never cooked with freshly killed chicken, do yourself a favor and scout out a quality live poultry shop. The fresher the kill, the better the texture. In Xi’an, you could just go to the street vendors and buy any chicken of your choice. At my grandmother’s house, we’d eat the chickens that were too old to lay eggs anymore.⁶ And in Flushing, there was a shop with everything: live rabbits, geese, ducks, pigeons, quail