Chicken Soup for the Nostalgic Soul

Husband went out of town this weekend. As fate would have it, the day he left, I woke up with the scratchy yuck that for me, always signals the beginnings of a cold. So when my husband called to check in, he asked how I felt, and reminded me that there were a few cans of soup in the pantry.

Sensitive to almost every food group and a bit of a culinary snob since going organic a couple of years ago, I tell him, “That’s not soup.”

He had no other suggestions for me.

What I longed for – well, most of you married ladies know what I’m talking about, and if you don’t, I hate you (just kidding) – and what I didn’t get, was comfort. I wanted someone to whine to about my stuffy nose and my stuffy head and say, “I’m sorry, sweetie. Let me get you some soup.”

And I don’t mean soup in a can.

I wanted the real stuff. I wanted the stuff that my grandfather taught me how to make. Although I’m not religiously practicing (I could never get it right, and I figured that all my practicing was for naught, so I quit), I come from the Jewish tradition. For the most part, the Jewish tradition does not come with recipes. At least those that are written down. It goes like this:

One day my grandfather said, “Ya wanna know how to make chicken soup? I’ll tell ya how to make chicken soup.”

I perked up and listened. He was a short order cook and used to run a restaurant. I figured that he knew from chicken soup.

My grandfather held both work-hardened hands out in front of him, elbows bent, palms pointing toward each other with the fingers slightly cupped, like he was holding something, oh, vaguely chicken-sized. “Ya take a nice chicken…”

In addition to having been a short order cook and running a restaurant, my grandfather also used to run a chicken farm. Not only did I figure that he knew from chicken soup, I was betting that he knew a thing or two from chickens.

“Ya put it in a pot. Throw in some water, a little onion, a little carrot, a little salt, boil it for a while, and there you are. Chicken soup.”

I knew not to bother asking him how I’d know when it was ready. Because the answer would be, “Ya cook it until it’s done.”

From my own mother, I would get more practical answers. Things like: when the meat falls away from the bone; or until it’s no longer pink in the middle; or, the one that perplexed me the most, which was probably inherited from her own mother, that it will just “look right.”

My mother is a fabulous cook. She starts with a recipe, and then improvises, based on her particular preferences, and what she happens to have in the house. I have literally seen her make a gourmet meal with a few limp scallions, a can of tuna, and some old croutons. She kept her extravagance to a minimum while she was raising three children on a tight budget and deferring to my father’s high blood pressure. But after their divorce, she unleashed her inner Julia Child.

Now everything starts with butter. A pound or more if it’s for a crowd. (I lose count of how many pounds she uses at Thanksgiving.) If it’s dinner, she adds meat, garlic and onions. If it’s dessert, she adds sugar and chocolate.

While Husband tells me otherwise (I must have trained him well), I don’t think I inherited my mother’s or even my grandfather’s cooking gene. I don’t know what I was thinking when I was toddling around the kitchen, watching her. Maybe I was daydreaming about the books I would write one day. Maybe I was just daydreaming in general – memorizing the pattern of the wallpaper, and the way the light shone through her collection of glass roosters on the window shelves.

Or maybe Husband was just being polite. I know how to do the basics, like boiling an egg, making an omelet, preparing dinner so the main dish and the sides are all done at the same time. I have a few signature dishes that I learned how to make, but these were from recipes I’ve culled from magazines over the years, and then made them so many times that I’ve memorized them.

But day-to-day cooking? As far as my likes and dislikes, that ranks somewhere between a gynecological exam and doing our taxes. Meanwhile, my husband, usually a good sport about having to forage through the refrigerator for dinner, often would slip in small comments about the dishes that he loved so much from his childhood.

I love those dishes too. His mother would make them for us when we came to visit. And since she passed away in January, I’ve been feeling especially nostalgic, among other things, for her cooking.

“Have her come over one day,” Husband said, a few years back. “You could learn how to cook more stuff, and she’ll feel really good about helping you.”

Yeah. And in no way would he benefit from this at all.

One of his favorite meals was her chicken soup. When she first made it for me, I expected that it would be just like my grandfather’s. But no – there was a twist. Yes, it started with what I assumed was a nice chicken. But hers had parsnips, and tons of dill.

Wait a minute. Parsnips?

This is the thing about families, and what I learned the first time I ever ate dinner at a friend’s house when I was a child. Everybody does things differently. Not every family had food made from scratch. Not every family had tossed salad with dinner. Not every family had whole wheat bread, instead of the kind that came in the plastic wrap with polka dots all over it.

And not every family made chicken soup the way ours did.

My mother-in-law served hers buffet-style. The broth ladled from one bowl, pieces of boiled chicken plucked from another, plus – another surprise -- both matzoh balls and egg noodles. My mother wouldn’t have gone for that – two starches at one meal? Never. And would my grandmother ever serve both matzoh balls and egg noodles? Not on your kishkes! It was matzoh balls or it was nothing.

So I already knew that my mother-in-law’s chicken soup would be a little different. And when I called her to ask if she would come over and show me how to make it, she was delighted. I carefully made note of all the ingredients she asked me to buy. And, as I suspected, it began with a nice chicken. She was easily half the size of my barrel-chested grandfather, but I can still imagine her, on her end of the phone conversation, making the same kind of gesture.

Was this the universal Jewish symbol for “chicken?”

One day, I’ll have to ask my rabbi. If I can remember his name.

So she came over. We put a nice chicken up to boil in a pot of water. And then we waited, watching it like an egg that was about to hatch.

Like a little Jewish Yoda, she stood by me, leaning on her cane. Watching and correcting, while I skimmed off shiny globules of fat and deposited them in an old tin can. She went out for a smoke. We added a little onion, some carrots, parsnips, a couple of stalks of celery, a ton of dill, a bit of salt, then started on the matzoh balls.

All in all, it had been a good day. It was a challenge, but we figured out how to make a giant pot of soup, fluffy matzoh balls, and egg noodles, all on my two-burner stove. And the crowd went wild.

Since this first tutorial, I’ve learned how to make her lasagna, her spaghetti sauce, and her brisket. I’ve made her soup a few times on my own, but because of my lousy memory, I committed a sin against Jewish oral tradition and wrote down the recipe as we went along.

Which was a good thing. Because several years later, with my throat scratchy and Husband out of town, I bundled myself up, and went out to buy myself a nice chicken.

I made my own comfort. And in this case, four quarts of it.

My mother tells me it freezes quite well.