The first and most important thing that you need to make a great, kosher chicken soup is a recipe from Bubbah. The second, and nearly as important an ingredient is chutzpah.
If you haven’t got either, then try it this way.
Buy a kosher (and koshered) medium size ROASTER chicken from a kosher butcher shop in Ripponlea or Balaclava. If they try to sell you a ‘boiler’, tell them about your life threatening cholesterol problems. The butcher will then spend twenty minutes telling you (liberally spicing the conversation with words like Cho-lera and Pas-kud-niak-is ) about how back in Poland before the war, boiler chickens, which they called penicillin, were the only thing that protected his family from the Cossacks. Please don’t point out to him that the Cossacks were Russian, not Polish.
If you are only kosher when guests come for dinner, buy your chicken at Coles. Just don’t expect any conversation.
Then go on to one of the fruiterers down the road and buy some onions, small carrots, a small parsnip and some celery. Remember to buy the specials down at the front of the shop because this is going into a soup, not a salad.
Go home.
Tell the kids to stop frassing all the time, because dinner will be ready in a couple of hours. Then answer the phone because Sarah has been trying to ring you all day, to tell you about Mindel’s operation. When she’s finished, tell her that you heard it already from Rachel, and you’re too busy to talk any more because you’re preparing dinner.
Take out the big soup pot from under the sink. Rinse it to get any dust out. Peel the carrots, leave whole. Peel the parsnip, leave whole. Peel the onion, just a little one, cut in half and chop it up roughly. When the kids ask you why you are crying, tell them it’s because of all the tzooras you’ve got.
Out of the whole head of celery, take one stick and cut it into thirds. Then ask yourself why you bought a whole head instead of a half. But then, it was on special…
Put the roaster chicken in the pot, cover with cold, clean water, and bring quickly to the boil on the stove.
Add the carrots, parsnip, onion and celery. Don’t forget the salt, because even though the chicken has been salted to make it Kosher, “It doesn’t shmeck without a pinch (or two or three) of salt.”
Remember, your husband Yankel doesn’t like too much pepper, in fact he doesn’t like any at all.
Bring the pot quickly to a boil, and then turn it down to a simmer, and let it go for about a quarter of an hour. Then take the lid off and scoop the scum off the top.
Put the lid back on, and let it simmer for another hour. Make sure that the lid has a little air gap so that the pot doesn’t boil over.
Lump it off the stove, drag it over to the sink, hold the towel over the lid and the handles, and pour the soup out the pot into a bowl straining out the chicken and the vegetables without scalding yourself. If you do, and you scream, remember that when the kids ask what’s wrong, say “It’s nothing” in a very martyr-like voice.
Let the soup cool, then put the bowl in the fridge overnight (remember to put it into the bottom where it is colder).
Take the schnitzels and borscht you made yesterday out of the fridge. Cook some cartoffle. Tell the kids to wash their hands and if they don’t finish their borscht, they don’t get any compote, and if they don’t finish their compote they can’t watch TV.
Ask Yankel how his day was.
Tomorrow afternoon take the chicken soup out of the fridge. Scrape off all the fat, and put it into a container to use for frying and making grievelas. Put a spoon of the fat back in – just for taste. Put another spoonful in because it still doesn’t shmeck.
Put enough soup into another pot for dinner, add the boiled chicken pieces and throw out the vegetables – Yankel doesn’t like vegetables. Reheat slowly, just till it boils, and simmer till dinner.
Boil another pot of water, add the lockshen and a pinch of salt, and boil till soft. If you don’t know when it’s soft, get your glasses and read the instructions. Then strain and put some in each person’s bowl. Remember, Yankel gets the most, the kids a lot, and you hardly any because you’re watching your waist.
Add the soup, serve it up, and tell Yankel not to zhip when he eats, because the children will grow up without any manners.
Story by Sholem Bando, Melbourne
Glossary
Borscht – Beetroot Soup
Bubbah – Grandmother
Cartoffle – Potatoes
Cho-lera – Cholera plague
Chutzpah – Gall / luck
Frassing – Eating
Grievelas – Blobs of Fried Chicken Fat
Lockshen – Egg noodles
Paskudniaks – Thieves or villains
Penicillin – What? You need to ask?
Shmeck – Taste
Tzooras – Sorrows
Zhip – Slurp
