"You can't eat this soup standing up, your knees buckle."
-- Jerry Seinfeld, Seinfeld, "The Soup Nazi"
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| Homemade chicken soup 1-19-14 |
"There's a sorrow and pain in everyone's life,
but every now and then there's a ray of light
that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort
like hot soup and a soft bed."
-- Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream
"Anyone who tells a lie has not pure heart,
and cannot make good soup."
-- Ludwig van Beethoven
When I was a kid, chicken soup came from a can. It was mostly mushy noodles and salty broth, with a couple of tiny bits of carrot and celery (I think) and maybe one grayish chunk of chickenish meat about the size and texture of a pencil eraser.
At our house, homemade soup happened once in a blue moon, usually made by my Dad, and was either bean (if there was a leftover ham bone from Easter) or turkey (if there was leftover turkey from Thanksgiving). His soup usually involved those foil-wrapped bouillon cubes, the first four ingredients of which are typically: salt, sugar, MSG and some kind of bad-for-you hydrogenated oil. Kind of takes the comfort out of comfort food, doesn't it?
My grandma, however, made delicious soup, with beef, and barley and colorful vegetables. She taught me how by letting me watch her do it. There was no written recipe, but her basic rules, I later learned, carried over to just about any soup I wanted to try:
- Keep it simple.
- Start with good meat and homemade stock.
- Let it cook long and slow so the flavors develop.
- Make extra and freeze it for those days when you don't have time to cook supper.
I make soup a lot. And I'm not too humble to admit that my soups are very delicious. I don't use recipes very often. Mostly I just wing it depending on what I have on hand. On a blustery day, a pot of soup bubbling away on the stove makes the whole house smell and feel warm and cozy. Add a loaf of crusty bread, a leafy green salad, and a bottle of wine, and, well, they don't call it comfort food for nothing.
"In January it's so nice
While slipping on the sliding ice
To sip hot chicken soup with rice
Sipping once, sipping twice
Sipping chicken soup with rice."
-- Carole King, "Chicken Soup With Rice"
