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02/24/2008 Archived Entry: "Jewish-Chinese Chicken Soup, A Couple of Kvetches"

I have been holding back. After my new Jewish book was sent to the printer – so this recipe is not in the book -- I had a chicken soup revelation that I have not yet shared with you. I call it Chinese-Jewish Fusion Soup. I also call it Miracle Chicken Soup, it’s that amazing. I’ll be demonstrating it in my cooking classes this spring (take a look at my appearance schedule), but I thought it was time to tell all of you who will not be able to attend one of those few classes. It’s my gift upon the publication of Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited, which is now available on Amazon.com, through Jessica’s Biscuit, the internet cookbook seller; Barnes & Noble on line, and should be at your local bookstore any minute, if not already. My friend the acclaimed baking teacher and writer, Nick Malgieri, just reported to me that he saw it on the “new arrivals” table as he walked in the door of a San Francisco Borders. Very exciting!

But back to the chicken soup:

I took a Chinese method of cooking chicken that I learned years ago from Rozanne Gold, and I applied it to making an Eastern European Jewish-seasoned broth. The method is already on my web site, posted on April 7, 2003 in the Maven’s Diary as Chinese Magic Chicken). But that version is without the ingredients -- the vegetables and herbs -- that make the broth taste like so-called Jewish penicillin.

There’s no need to click through to that web site page right now. Here’s the basic method:

Take an approximately 4-pound chicken. It can be 1/2 pound more or less. Put it in a large pot that will hold it snugly, not touching the sides of the pot but filling it pretty well. Add enough cold tap water to cover by about 1 inch. Add 2 tablespoons of salt. (Okay, less if you are afraid of that much salt.) Add 1 tablespoon of whole peppercorns. They can be black or white. Cover the pot. Put it over high heat. Bring it to a boil. As soon as the steam starts coming out from under the cover, turn off the heat. Off heat, let the pot sit for 3 hours. Do not open the cover. Do not peek.

The whole point of this method is to get a great chicken, not great broth. The chicken will be spectacularly moist. The breast meat will be velvety. Even this dark meat lover likes the breast of a chicken cooked by this method. All I need is a bit of salt to enjoy it straight, even without the skin.
This is the way I cook chicken when I need already cooked chicken for chicken salad, or a pot pie, although that’s a Joan Hamburg specialty, not mine … like that. The resulting broth has merely been a bonus in the past. It’s not the greatest for sipping as soup, although pretty good, and certainly better than anything you can buy canned or boxed for cooking. I freeze it.

Add some other seasonings, however, and you’ve got a great bowl of broth to sip for its own sake.
So here’s the way to make it taste “Jewish:”

To the pot with the chicken, add a couple of carrots, cut into 1/2-inch dice, plus a large, outside rib of celery and a medium onion, both diced to the same size as the carrots. If your family likes parsnip in the soup (mine does and I do), add no more than 1/2 a medium parsnip. You may have to experiment with the amounts of the vegetables to get the taste your family likes. And here’s a warning: If you add green herbs to your chicken soup – parsley and dill are the usual – don’t add them to the pot in the beginning. Instead, add them when you reheat the soup. Even when I make my normal soup, simmered for hours, I don’t add the herbs until the end. They give the soup a green or gray caste if they cook with the chicken and other vegetables the whole time. And they give up their flavor very quickly. There’s no need to cook them a long time.

I can’t say my Chinese-Jewish method makes soup as good as the recipe in “Jewish Home Cooking,” the soup of my fore-mothers. For one thing, this fusion method does not produce a broth with much gelatin. It lacks a rich texture. It won’t gel when refrigerated.

On the other hand, instead of the totally cooked-out birds that result from simmering them for a good, rich broth, with this method you get a great chicken with good-enough broth. I am not about to give up on my long-cooked, old-fashioned “Jewish” chicken soup formula, as outlined at great length in “Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking,” especially for a special occasion, but I do love the ease of this new method. Try it and report back.

KVETCH OF THE WEEK
The correct pronunciation of the Italian word for toasted and seasoned bread, now astoundingly popular in the U.S., is bruce-ket-tah (bruschetta), not broosh-et-ah. It kills me that as popular as this item has become Americans can’t, won’t, or in any case don’t pronounce it correctly. It’s not like “ch” sounding like “k” is unknown in English. May I cite “Christ” as an outstanding example of this usage? How about chronic, chromatic, and chiropractor?

Now, if you watch American Idol (I do), you have been subjected to a new item called Freschetta. It’s some kind of pizza. I don’t even remember exactly what it is because I have been so appalled that the voice-over announcer pronounces it Fresh-et-ah. This only confirms to Americans that broosh-et-ah is correct.

By the way, onto another peeve (kvetch): It is not the chopped tomato topping that is the bruschetta. It is the bread, the toasted bread, on which the condiment is heaped. Bruschetta can be topped with almost anything your heart desires. The simplest would be a rub of raw garlic, a drizzle of olive oil (or more), and a sprinkling of salt. In Italy, there are pizzerias and restaurants with whole lists of bruschette (the plural). Still, American food manufacturers now put a diced tomato relish in jars and call the mixture “bruschetta,” And it’s pronounced broosh-et-ah. Naturally!

A GOOD LINK
One of you was looking for a Penne alla Vodka recipe on the internet and found it through a reference on Wikipedia that linked to my web site, where there has been a recipe for the astoundingly popular dish since the inception of The Food Maven in 1999. I am, of course, thrilled that I am listed and linked through Wikipedia, although I have to say I don’t agree with the various claims made in the entry about the derivation of the dish. Read mine on my web site. Decide what you believe. When it comes to inconsequential things like this, I always pick the one that’s the most fun to believe. (By the way, my website on Wikipedia is incorrectly cited as Goodmaven, instead of Foodmaven.)

Okay, another kvetch: You guys don’t use my site enough as a source of recipes. There are more than 300 recipes there now, and I keep adding, slowly but surely. The index – yes, there is a recipe index – does not include about the last year’s worth of recipes, but it does list the bulk of them and it’ll give you an idea of the scope of what’s here. To actually find a recipes, please use the search box. It can be lame, too, but if you put in a good keyword, you get good citations back. Usually. I have a new webmaster – take a bow Alex Ivanov – and he’s trying to improve this feature. Meanwhile, when you need a recipe, please check the website and see if there isn’t something here that fits the bill.

ANOTHER LINK
Debra Duckman, a Cook at Seliano alumna, and now a good friend, just told me about a site that she loves, and now I love, too. It is called Italiannotebook.com (Italian Note Book). When you sign up -- for free -- you will receive via email a short essay about Italy every day. Every day. Short. Interesting. Colorful. Often witty. Always very accurate. And all the daily items have been archived on the site. I got lost in it. I wait every day for my bit of Italy to arrive in my mail box.