Matters of taste

Can a goy make proper chicken soup? For a dish so steeped in legend, the recipe is amazingly simple. The big problem is finding the right kind of chicken
October 24, 2008

A treat during this year's dull Edinburgh festival was hearing Steven Berkoff ramble on Jewishness and food. Drawing on his memoir My Life in Food (ACDC Publishing), Berkoff made a case for Jews being closer to their food than most races, and more influenced by what they eat than any other. Interesting stuff, although we weren't entirely convinced by Berkoff's claim that the design of the Large Hadron Collider was deliberately modelled by the Jewish physicists at Cern on the shape of the bagel.

Berkoff told the audience about his east London childhood: the tastes, the smells, the people and the chickens. "The Jewish people dropped the lion as a symbol of their race, and the chicken became a Jewish god. And so, just as people who love cats become feline and the British upper class look and talk like their dogs, the Jews became more chicken-like: look at the nose, the cluck-cluck-cluck of their talk, slightly neurotic, slightly shrieking. The east end was full of people who had taken on the characteristics of chickens."

Berkoff—who has the characteristics of a well-fed but menacing bear—delivered this with a brio that made his claims hard to argue with. He then rhapsodised about the apotheosis of the Jewish relationship with chickens: chicken soup, "Jewish penicillin," the Proustian biscuit of any European Jewish childhood. "Unctous, golden, life-enhancing, reaffirming," said Berkoff. And so, goy though I am, I had to make some.

Proper Jewish chicken soup is amazingly simple to cook. I dug out four or five different recipes and they all pretty much agreed: take one whole chicken, cover it in water, chuck in celery, an onion and any other available root vegetables, and boil, for at least three and as many as seven hours. Then strain the liquid and cool it to remove the chicken fat, called shmaltz in Yiddish (and the origin of the term "schmaltz"). For the full Friday family supper experience, serve hot with vermicelli and matzoh balls lurking in the golden-brown depths.

There's not much more to it than that. On the internet there's lots of talk about special ingredients: ginger, grated yam, nutmeg, cloves, sugar, a pinch of curry powder, a glass of Marsala. Most authorities agree on the necessity of dill. Leaving the onion's skin on will enhance the colour. One "secret" ingredient is so commonly cited in the recipes it does not deserve the epithet: "mother's love."

I asked two north London Jewish mothers, Georgie Tarn and Tracey Fine, whether I, male and only very slightly—if at all—Jewish, was capable of a proper chicken soup. Tarn and Fine call themselves the "Jewish Princesses" and write books on cookery and entertaining. They make chicken soup for their families every Wednesday, so that it has time to mature in the fridge before Friday evening. "Anyone can make it," they told me. "Even Jewish girls who don't cook at all will cook it—because you just can't buy it." Is it that crucial? "Of course!" they gasped. So important is the soup to family wellbeing that when the Fines and Tarns go on summer holiday to the south of Spain, they take kosher chickens in their luggage.

The type of chicken is very important. Most recipes call for a "fowl" or "hen," meaning an older bird with lots of taste that has finished its egg-laying career. "The trick is using an old, scrawny, haggard chicken," say the princesses. But such a thing is just about impossible to find in the modern British city.

I asked my butcher for an elderly fowl and he said there wasn't a chance: the closest thing he could think of was a grouse. An over-the-hill hen will have lived as long as six years. Industrially farmed chickens, of the sort you can buy for £2 in the supermarket, live for only around 40 days. They are bred to have as little taste as possible, it being more lucrative for retailers to sell you taste separately, in a packet or jar. Free range or organic birds live for only another two weeks or so, and in any case, a bird bred for meat will be excessively fatty. In the end I bought a small bird from a halal butcher, added a chicken heart I'd begged from the butcher and used extra chicken stock.

The soup was glorious and we ate every drop. But my wife, who once had a Jewish boyfriend and ate many Shabbat suppers at his parents' house, didn't think it genuine. It should have lumps of chicken, she said. But I'd read that only the very thrifty keep the chicken meat, which loses its flavour in the cooking of the soup. "Your cat may turn up its nose, should you offer it," wrote one authority.

And the penicillin effect? Legend has it that two Israeli researchers once applied to the World Health Organisation to have chicken soup listed as an "essential medicine." Apparently, chicken soup has been shown to affect the activities of virus-fighting white blood cells. I've found one first-hand investigation, from a doctor at the University of Nebraska Medical Centre, which states that various chicken soups appeared, in the laboratory, to inhibit the action of neutrophils, which may play a role in causing congestion in a viral infection of the respiratory system. He found that his wife's home-made soup slowed down the neutrophils. But, sadly, Campbell's tinned soup did the job even better.

The Jewish Princesses and their recipes can be found at thejewishprincess.com