Hainanese

Hainanese (Hainan Romanised: Hái-nâm-oe, simplified Chinese: 海南话; traditional Chinese: 海南話; pinyin: Hǎinán huà), also known as Qióng Wén (simplified Chinese: 琼文; traditional Chinese: 瓊文) or Qióng yǔ (瓊語/琼语), is a group of Min Chinese varieties spoken in the southern Chinese island province of Hainan. In the classification of Yuan Jiahua, it was included in the Southern Min group, though is mutually unintelligible with Southern Min varieties such as Teochew and Hokkien–Taiwanese. In the classification of Li Rong, used by the Language Atlas of China, it was treated as a separate Min subgroup. It is sometimes combined with Leizhou Min, spoken on the neighboring mainland Leizhou Peninsula, in a Qiong–Lei group. "Hainanese" is also used for the language of the Li people living in Hainan, but generally refers to Min varieties spoken in Hainan.

Phonology

Hainanese has a simple vowel system .

Hainanese notably has a series of implosive consonants, which it acquired through contact with surrounding languages, probably Hlai.

Chicken and rice

Chicken and rice or similar may refer to:

See also

Hainanese chicken rice

Hainanese chicken rice is a dish adapted from early Chinese immigrants originally from Hainan province in southern China. It is considered one of the national dishes of Singapore. Hainanese chicken rice is most commonly associated with Singaporean, Malaysian and Hainanese cuisines, although it is also popular in Thailand and Vietnam. It is based on a well-known Hainanese dish called Wenchang chicken (文昌雞), due to its adoption by the Hainanese overseas Chinese population in the Nanyang area (present-day Southeast Asia). Catherine Ling of CNN describes Hainanese chicken rice as one of the "40 Singapore foods we can't live without". It also listed at number 45 on World's 50 most delicious foods complied by CNN Go in 2011. In Malaysia, as in Singapore, chicken rice is available in many Chinese coffee shops, restaurants and street hawker stalls, and also in chain restaurants such as The Chicken Rice Shop and OldTown White Coffee.

Preparation

The chicken is prepared by traditional Hainanese methods, which involve poaching the entire chicken at sub-boiling temperatures in a pork and chicken bone stock, reusing the broth over and over and only topping it up with water when needed, in accordance with Chinese techniques for creating master stocks. This stock is not used for rice preparation, which instead involves chicken stock created specifically for that purpose, producing an oily, flavourful rice sometimes known as "oily rice", sometimes prepared with Southeast Asian pandan leaves. Some cooks may add coconut milk to the rice, reminiscent of the Malay dish nasi lemak.

Chicken

The chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is a domesticated fowl, a subspecies of the red junglefowl. As one of the most common and widespread domestic animals, with a population of more than 19 billion in 2011, there are more chickens in the world than any other species of bird or domestic animal. Humans keep chickens primarily as a source of food, consuming both their meat and their eggs.

Genetic studies have pointed to multiple maternal origins in Southeast-, East-, and South Asia, but with the clade found in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa originating in the Indian subcontinent. From India, the domesticated chicken was imported to Lydia in western Asia Minor, and to Greece by the fifth century BC. Fowl had been known in Egypt since the mid-15th century BC, with the "bird that gives birth every day" having come to Egypt from the land between Syria and Shinar, Babylonia, according to the annals of Thutmose III.

Terminology

In the UK and Ireland adult male chickens over the age of one year are primarily known as cocks, whereas in America, Australia and Canada they are more commonly called roosters. Males less than a year old are cockerels.Castrated roosters are called capons (surgical and chemical castration are now illegal in some parts of the world). Females over a year old are known as hens and younger females as pullets although in the egg-laying industry, a pullet becomes a hen when she begins to lay eggs at 16 to 20 weeks of age. In Australia and New Zealand (also sometimes in Britain), there is a generic term chook /ˈtʃʊk/ to describe all ages and both sexes. The young are called chicks and the meat is called chicken.

Rice

Rice is the seed of the grass species Oryza sativa (Asian rice) or Oryza glaberrima (African rice). As a cereal grain, it is the most widely consumed staple food for a large part of the world's human population, especially in Asia. It is the agricultural commodity with the third-highest worldwide production, after sugarcane and maize, according to 2012 FAOSTAT data.

Since a large portion of maize crops are grown for purposes other than human consumption, rice is the most important grain with regard to human nutrition and caloric intake, providing more than one-fifth of the calories consumed worldwide by humans.

Wild rice, from which the crop was developed, may have its native range in Australia. Chinese legends attribute the domestication of rice to Shennong, the legendary emperor of China and inventor of Chinese agriculture. Genetic evidence has shown that rice originates from a single domestication 8,200–13,500 years ago in the Pearl River valley region of China. Previously, archaeological evidence had suggested that rice was domesticated in the Yangtze River valley region in China.