The chicken is tender and velvety, a little crisp at its edges, surrounded by coins of ginger and cloves of garlic. The sauce is dark and pungent — soy sauce cut through with aged rice wine and studded with bits of scallion, perfect for ladling onto rice. There is a sweetness in there as well, sugar and sesame against the salt of the soy, with a faint hit of peppery fire. A handful or two of Thai basil added at the end imparts a floral punch.

The dish is called three-cup chicken, and it makes for a simple and excellent dinner that you can prepare in well under an hour.

It is Taiwanese in origin, which is to say it is cooked across the island and wherever Taiwanese have landed after they’ve left. But like much Taiwanese cooking, the dish has roots in China. The history of three-cup chicken is often traced back to the 13th century, to the execution of the Song dynasty hero Wen Tianxiang. A guard is said to have made the dish for Wen out of the prison’s limited resources on his final night of life, some scant bits of chicken slowly braised in oil, soy sauce, rice wine. One cup of each.

“It’s a seminal dish,” Eddie Huang, the jocular restaurateur whose Taiwanese-American childhood in Orlando, Fla., is the subject of the ABC television comedy “Fresh Off the Boat,” told me when I called him. “You’ll be judged on it.” But its origin story, Huang cautioned, is a dangerous one. Cooking three-cup chicken with an equal ratio of oil and soy and rice wine leads to a greasy, unappetizing mess. “If you actually cook it that way, you’ll be in trouble,” he said. “The point is to draw the sugar out of all the ingredients using a little sesame oil, but not a lot.”