How to eat chicken feet

David Lang showing the proper method for eating chicken feet. Dangle the toes out of your mouth. Photo by David Lansing.

So anyway, about those chicken feet. You know how you can bite into something like a kogi taco and go, Ohmygod, that is so good!

Well, you’re not going to do that with chicken feet. I guess for some people chicken feet might be comfort food. You know, particularly if you lived on a farm in China and had a hundred chickens running around and you had to feed the chickens and then your dad, maybe once a week, put a dozen or so chickens in a wire cage and took them to the local market to be sold alive, and your reward for feeding the chickens was to have your mom make you steamed chicken feet on Sundays.

But none of that ever happened to me so I don’t have those chicken feet memories. I don’t think Mijune does either.

Anyway, I ate the chicken feet. Not much to it. Little bit of meat around the ankles (do chickens have ankles?) and then you could kind of suck on the toes if you wanted.

David Lang, who moved to Los Angeles from Hong Kong 18 years ago, liked the chicken feet more than I did. He ate several of them.

“You not going to eat more chicken feet?” he’d say. We’d all shake our heads. “Okay then,” he’d say, grabbing for another one, using his chopsticks to stick the skinny leg part in his mouth first so the toes dangled from his mouth like the fingers of a baby’s hand. I think I liked watching David Lang eat chicken feet more than I liked eating chicken feet. But that’s just me.

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1 comment

  1. Angeline’s avatar

    That chicken foot in David Lang’s mouth looks like a foot of substance. I keep seeing the chicken feet in the local Mexican markets here, and they are all skinny, more like a back scratcher. Definitely, no ankles.

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