A Chinese friend asked me today what Chinese Lemon Chicken is. I replied that I didn’t know but would find out. So I spent a while online and discovered that it is popular American-Chinese dish, which explains why she (and I) had never heard of it. The local dish, Zhuang Lemon Duck, made using salt preserved lemons, is known within Guangxi but little known elsewhere in China.
One recipe for lemon chicken on the internet, described as authentically ‘Chinese’, included sambal oelek which is authentically Indonesian instead.
When I lived in Hunan in the late 1990s, lemons were almost unknown but always unfindable. They are easy to find here further south but rare in northern China. In fact, Chinese has no native word for lemon, instead borrowing the English name and rendering a near phonetic version - 柠檬 / 檸檬 (níng méng).
Here, lemon sauce is widely available in these small 150 gram jars and used mainly as a dip for grilled / BBQd meats.
It is thin and very tart. You could, I suppose, use it to make a 糖醋 (táng cù, literally ‘sugar-vinegar’), sweet and sour dish, but sweet and sour chicken is the rarest of all the sweet and sour dishes available; dishes using pork rib and fish are dominant in that genre.
I have no idea what this. Certainly not available here.
Lays do have these, though, but then they are American, too.
