Minced Chicken in Lettuce Cups

Recipe from Lawrence C.C. Chu



Classic but simple to prepare, this beautiful dish is also elegant to serve. The chicken and black mushrooms are scooped into lettuce, to be eaten out of hand.

Yields:

6-8 servings

Time Required:

Ingredients:

Marinade



Sauce

Preparation:

Soak mushrooms in warm water for 20 mins.; remove, drain, and coarsely chop.

Mince chicken and combine with MARINADE ingredients in the order listed; let stand for 10 mins.

Cut 1" (2.5 cm) off the end of lettuce head. Peel off large leaves, and trim with scissors to make circles about 4-5" (10-13 cm) in diameter.

Combine SAUCE ingredients thoroughly; set aside.

To deep-fry, heat 2 cups (475 mL) oil in a wok (or electric deep-fat fryer) to 350°F (175°C). Add rice sticks, little by little, and fry for about 15 secs., until puffed. Remove immediately, drain, and transfer to a large serving platter.

To oil-blanch, turn off heat until oil in wok is reduced to 300°F (150°C). Add chicken, stirring to separate. Remove and drain.

To stir-fry, remove all but 3 Tbsp. (45 mL) oil from wok. Reheat, swirling pan to coat sides.

Add pork, stirring to separate. Add green onion, stirring until fragrant. Stir in bamboo shoots, mushrooms, and water chestnuts for 30 secs.

Return chicken and add sauce, tossing vigorously to coat thoroughly.

To serve, spoon chicken mixture on top of rice sticks. Sprinkle with peanuts. Arrange lettuce rounds on another plate. Toss rice and chicken lightly at the table. Spoon 2-3 Tbsp. (30-45 mL) mixture into each lettuce cup to eat out of hand.

Author's Notes

Squab may be substituted for chicken.

Don't try to deep-fry the rice sticks all at one time; they need room to expand.


1 Quarts, pints, cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, and fl. oz. are as defined in US Customary Units, not to be confused with differing British imperial, "legal", "coffee", Commonwealth of Nations, Canadian, Latin American, Japanese, Russian, or Dutch definitions — further proof that everyone needs the metric system.

2 Rice sticks, also called rice vermicelli or rice noodles, are thin, long, brittle sticks made from rice flour and sold in 4-to-6 oz. (110-to-170 g) packages. When deep-fried, they puff up and become lightly crunchy. Or, soaked in water, to become soft and noodle-like, they're used in soup or chow mein. Store dry rice sticks, tightly wrapped, in a dry location almost indefinitely.

3 Oyster sauce is made from mixing oyster extracts, sugar, salt, water, and corn starch, sometimes darkened with caramel, heated and bottled. I would advise being careful to pick a quality sauce, owing to risk of dangerous contaminants.

"Corn starch" is powdered starch processed from the New World grain maize (from Spanish, orig. from Nahuatl), which grain the USA/Canada call "corn", unlike the rest of the English-speaking world, which reserves "corn" to mean cereal grains generically. This starch product, needed here in its customary role as a thickening agent, is called "corn starch" in the US/Canada, but "cornflour" in the UK and most other anglophone lands — not to be confused with whole maize grain: That product — not a thickening agent — is called "polenta", "corn meal", or "corn flour" in the US/Canada, depending on how finely milled, and called "maize flour" in the UK and most other places. Australians should beware that their "cornflour" is starch extracted from wheat kernel, sometimes more-helpfully labelled as "wheaten cornflour". As if that weren't confusing enough, the maize-based thickener may be labelled (in Australia) either as "corn flour" or as "corn starch", so beware. Further, the maize flour product, there, is labelled as "cornmeal".

Note that whole-maize grain is traditionally, in Meso-American cultures of origin, wisely soaked in alkaline solution ("nixtamalised") to increase bioavailability and thereby prevent niacin deficiency (pellagra), among other important benefits, yielding "masa" (lit. dough) aka "masa de maíz" (lit. maize dough), also available in dried & ground form as "masa harina" (lit. dough flour) aka "harina de maíz" (lit. maize flour), and in its unground form, hominy. As further complication, Americans distinguish "corn flour", meaning prepared from maize endosperm only, from "maize flour" for use of whole maize — the former, neutral-flavoured; the latter, much more nutritious.

Origin of the naming mess: Originally, North America shared with Mother England the language's original meaning of "corn" to mean cereal grains generically (from Old English "corn" meaning single seed of any cereal plant, orig. from Proto-Germanic "kurnam" meaning small seed). The colonists got the gift of maize from native peoples, therefore at first calling it "Indian corn". Later, in the USA and Canada, "Indian corn" got worn down to just "corn", while the original meaning of "corn" was lost, locally. "Maize" is thus now the least-ambiguous term in international contexts, though many Americans either don't know that word or reserve it for variants from Latin-American (and Spanish) cooking.

4 White pepper is the same Piper nigrum berry seed as is sold as black pepper, except left to fully ripen, fermented in water, and the black outer coat removed. Accordingly, it has a milder flavour and lighter colour. Otherwise, one is a natural substitute for the other.

5 I bought ground meat for decades before realising how quick and easy it is to grind (deboned) meat in a food processor, producing better, fresher, and cheaper food.

Taken from: Lawrence C.C. Chu's classic cookbook Chef Chu's Distinctive Cuisine Of China, p. 71. published 1980 by Harper and Row, which can be checked out in scanned format at Internet Archive. Thank you! (Chu's the chef / restaurateur of beloved local restaurant Chef Chu's, in Los Altos, California.)

Collected and re-published at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/recipes/minced-chicken-in-lettuce-cups.html by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> on Oct. 4, 2026. Individual recipes are free from copyright. Share and enjoy!

(If I have any copyright title in my own very minor contributions to this page — not my intention — they were created in 2026 by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> and licensed for use under CC0. I have thereby waived all copyright, compilation copyright, and related or neighbouring rights to this work. This work is published from: United States of America.)