Detroit’s favorite Chinese dish isn’t pretty. But Michigan loves it anyway.

Being from Michigan means you can turn your hand into a vertical mitten and quickly and proudly designate your hometown. But when you really want to show your Michigan, especially your Metro Detroit, bona fides, you bring up a dish that’s rife with arguments about its origin, the ideal way to prepare it, and even the color of its sauce.

Boneless Almond Chicken is as Detroit as Motown and White Flight. It’s not Instagram friendly or pretty to look at. Boneless Almond Chicken looks like someone lost a fight with a gravy boat and Marie Callender’s. A thick chicken breast, encased in crispy golden batter and cut into strips like thick broken piano keys, sits atop shredded lettuce. A wide strip of brown (sometimes yellow) sauce covers everything. A few flaked almonds are thrown on top. It’s a Chinese restaurant order that, when mentioned to any Michigander, lights up their face, and it’s most certainly the dish that Detroiters agree is theirs. Beyond that, everything is a struggle.

My strongest memory of almond chicken is at the now-defunct Hoy Tin Restaurant in East Jefferson, a softly red-lit spot overlooking the Detroit River. In front of me and my newly divorced mother is the restaurant’s famous platter of pupus, glistening on a lazy Susan. Next to us is my mother’s new best friend, Mary Lou, also divorced, with a streak of white hair in her gray hair. (She would later sing a tearful version of “Send in the Clowns” at Pinky Piano Bar, also on Jefferson.) My mother orders eggs foo young and I get my plate of boneless almond chicken. These were among a handful of dishes we were allowed to eat outside of my mother’s Italian-American cooking. ABC hasn’t strayed too far from our familiar chicken cutlets. But he got away enough to make a good impression.

The dish, I should say, is… good. Beige on beige on beige. My emotional attachment to this subject is not as restricted, however. When I left Michigan and realized I couldn’t find this dish anywhere else, I suddenly wanted to know everything about it. My entire childhood seemed to hinge on how that plaque had been locked up in Michigan (and, arguably, parts of Ohio?). Who put it together first, and why has something so ubiquitous here barely been recorded elsewhere? I went to find the source. But it turns out that researching the origin story of this dish takes you deep into someone else’s memories, their grandmother or father, their own childhood and the Detroit they once knew.

Curtis Chin grew up with a definitive answer to the birth of almond boneless chicken. His family’s Detroit restaurant, Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, operated for 60 years. His memoirs, Everything I learned, I learned in a Chinese restaurantis organized around the restaurant menu. The boneless almond chicken is in the spotlight.

“My grandmother invented it,” Chin told me. “I never questioned it.”

Her grandmother was such a force in her family that if she said she made the first plate of ABC, that was pretty much it. His explanation, as far as Chin remembers, also makes perfect sense. She lived in Detroit, saw people eating fried chicken with gravy, and would make something they would order.

Chin sees the dish as an early Detroit fusion, shaped by auto workers, southern blacks who migrated north and immigrants cooking for their customers. Chung’s sat in this notoriously segregated city, but inside, Chin said, “Black or white, rich or poor, Christian or Jewish, to the restaurant, everyone came.” » Her grandmother also prepared corned beef for Irish customers. Michigan hunters brought deer meat from the North and Chung’s cooked with it.

But when it comes to Chin’s grandmother, the story of boneless almond chicken isn’t so simple. Ohio has versions called war su gai and wor sue gai and makes its own claims to the dish. Another possible ancestor is almond pressed duck, an older Cantonese American dish. So maybe ABC is fried chicken and gravy. Maybe it’s duck pressed with almonds after a Midwestern focus group. Or maybe Grandma Chin made it up.

Lisa Yee-Litzenberg, career coach and member of the Detroit Chinatown vision committeesays his father, Henry Yee, certainly never made such a claim.

Yet, as the “unofficial mayor of Chinatown,” Henry Yee occupies a major place in the history of boneless almond chicken. He owned the Forbidden City in Detroit’s Second Chinatown; Yee-Litzenberg started working there when she was 5 years old. Detroit’s original Chinatown had been displaced by urban renewal and the new freeway exit. In an unusual move, the city created a second Chinatown on the other side of town.

For young Yee-Litzenberg, “working” meant spending time playing in the Forbidden City’s huge interior, which included a tiki bar, three separate dining rooms and a water fountain. Yee-Litzenberg remembers running around the space with her siblings and the children of other Chinatown restaurant workers, making soy sauce “potions” in ashtrays while her father calculated how much money they cost him.

She also remembers the restaurant making staggering quantities of boneless almond chicken. She remembers 5-gallon buckets filled with neon yellow sauce, perhaps her father’s version of “Tahitian chicken” (a sweet and tangy dish usually made with tropical fruit served over rice), she said.

Whatever the inspiration, she remembers the kitchen preparing this popular dish in large quantities. The dough, she remembers (although shaky), was a mixture of flour, baking soda, egg and water and was mixed in large containers. Huge chicken breasts were cut to size, dipped, fried in a giant wok and arranged on plates stacked eight high on rolling carts. There was no sacred written family recipe. His father cooked by touch.

You never talked about its origins. Plus, his boneless almond chicken broke several rules: a topping of fresh peanuts instead of almonds, green onions on top, rice as a bed instead of lettuce. The sauce’s fluorescent yellow may have been made with food coloring, Yee-Litzenberg said.

It turns out that ABC may be one of those dishes that doesn’t have a single, clear origin story. Or even a rigid recipe. Having recently tasted several versions, I can attest that the appearance of the chicken slices is similar across the board, but that’s it. I’ve eaten it at upscale Chinese restaurants in metro Detroit, but the best I tasted was at a small, take-out-only, walk-up suburban restaurant on Mack Avenue in Grosse Pointe Woods (shout out to Wan Kow Chop Suey!).

Helen Kwong, a researcher now living in New York, wrote about this dish for Hour Detroit. She grew up in a family of Chinese restaurants in the suburbs and her aunt showed her how their sauce was made. She said it was chicken broth, MSG and dark soy sauce. Kwong calls this recipe “a copy of a copy of a copy of boneless almond chicken.”

I like it – it seems like everyone has their own “copy”, with their own memories and meanings. Maybe that’s why ABC was never really able to leave Detroit. Yee-Litzenberg sees the origins of her boneless almond chicken like his father’s version of Tahitian chicken. Chin sees his grandmother’s connection to Detroiters. And Kwong saw it as comfort food for his childhood.

“It’s such a Chinese dish,” she told me before reconsidering her decision. “Well, it’s an American dish. Made in a Chinese restaurant.”

For the restaurant kids who have this dish in their DNA, this is their home. For me, it was a bridge to something outside of my world.

I began my quest for boneless almond chicken by asking who invented it and why it didn’t leave Detroit, like our pizza did, which we simply call “square pizza” but is now known as “Detroit-style” since New York City discovered it. I still don’t have all the answers. But I think I understand a little better why such a beige dish is so durable and so locked in a place like the moat that is Michigan – all lakes, no escape. I also thought I preferred the brown sauce to the yellow. But Wan Kow, you proved to me fake.