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Felicity's perfect chicken soup
Felicity's perfect chicken soup. Photograph: Felicity Cloake
Felicity's perfect chicken soup. Photograph: Felicity Cloake

How to make perfect chicken soup

This article is more than 13 years old
Can anyone make better chicken soup than a Jewish mother, and can a good one really cure colds and soothe all ills?

The problem with all the diets that are plugged at this time of year – drop a dress size by Valentine's Day! Real secrets of Cheryl Cole's blood type diet! – is that they all, without exception, involve salad. This fact dooms us all to failure from the very start; it's difficult to work up much enthusiasm for a sad plate of leaves when you've battled home through the snow. Much easier to let the lettuce rot and reach for the pizza delivery leaflet instead.

Chicken soup, however, ticks the January box on a number of counts: as Jewish mothers have always known, it's the business for colds, and, more importantly, it comes in big steaming bowls, which look a lot less depressing than a frigid side plate of salad. You can, of course, buy chicken soup, but that won't be as good for you; making your own ticks another new year box – thrift and industry. If you're eating ready meals in January, where will you be by next Christmas, except stony broke?

Jewish penicillin

Claudia Roden chicken soup
Claudia Roden's recipe calls for a whole chicken to be simmered. Photograph: Felicity Cloake

Chicken soup is, of course, the star of the Jewish cooking repertoire – it has, one must admit, wider crossover appeal than chopped liver and gefilte fish balls – so it made sense to turn to the Ashkenazi community for my first recipe. Claudia Roden's masterful survey of Jewish food comes up with the goods, as well a brief, but interesting gobbet of history on the goldene yoich, or golden broth, so called because of the amber globules of fat floating on top. These days, she adds, almost sadly, these are often skimmed off as unhealthy, and the colour accentuated with a pinch of saffron instead.

Traditionally, according to Roden, this wedding-party and Shabbat favourite is made with a boiling fowl, although, she admits, many people now use chicken carcasses, giblets and chicken stock cubes instead. I find myself with a dilemma; the only boiling fowl I can find down at the local market are of dubious origin, which makes me less than enthusiastic about cooking them. I decide instead to go for an organic bird, at about three times the price, and hope the extra investment will pay dividends in the flavour department. (Thankfully the recipe anticipates this very modern dilemma, and gives instructions for ordinary chicken too.)

The soup is basically a chicken stock – simmered with onion, carrot, leek, turnip, celery, parsley and white pepper for 2½ hours, although the bird itself is stripped of meat after an hour, so it doesn't overcook, and the carcass alone returned to the pan for the remaining cooking time. The broth is then strained – not much fat on this fowl – and seasoned. It's nice; very wholesome tasting, certainly, and the bird has done the business in the meat flavour stakes but, (dare I say it?) it's uncompromisingly plain. No doubt that's the point, but would it be crime to spice things up a bit?

Heston's take

Heston chicken soup
Heston's chicken soup with lokshn. Photograph: Felicity Cloake

As someone who regards himself as Jewish, albeit agnostic with it, Heston Blumenthal seems the celebrity chef to trust when it comes to chicken soup. His recipe, however, is a puzzle. I put a kilogram of chicken wings in cold water and bring them to boil, skim the top, as if I'm making a stock, then lift out the wings, rinse and pat them dry – and then cook them, with butter, carrot, onion and celeriac and mushrooms for 15 minutes.

Aha, I think, stockpot at the ready – now I add the poaching liquor. But no, Heston wants white wine, followed by more fresh water. I go through more boiling and skimming, a 30 minute simmer, and then, after adding leeks, celery and fresh ginger, a final quarter of an hour to finish it off. The original water isn't mentioned again, which makes me wonder why I went to the trouble of skimming it in the first place. No matter, the soup is more robustly flavoured than Claudia's, although I find the star anise (how Heston loves his anise) and the mushrooms more obvious than the chicken, and suspect that all that butter, while undoubtedly delicious, may well counteract any health benefits.

Beefing it up

Lindsey Bareham's A Celebration of Soup is perhaps the only book anyone needs to own on the subject – so naturally, it includes 30 recipes for chicken soup: Saxon ehestandskachen, chicken with watercress, chicken and andouille gumbo, and, simplest of all, chicken with matzah balls. She prefaces this last with the reminiscences of a Polish Jew on the subject, which seems to imply that poultry feet are the secret to a rich flavour and colour – but then, somewhat disappointingly, demands only a boiling chicken, or a chicken quarter plus raw carcass.

Lindsey Bareham chicken soup
Lindsey Bareham's chicken soup with matzah balls. Photograph: Felicity Cloake

Having already tried out the whole chicken route, I opt for the latter approach. Her method is similar to Claudia Roden's, thankfully – no sautéing stage, or patting dry of half-cooked meat – but instead of covering the meat with cold water, she uses beef stock. It also cooks much more quickly than Roden's soup – just an hour's simmering, and I'm ready to add the lokshn and matzah balls. The stock has given it a richer colour, but also an undeniably beefy tang; it's more savoury, but also less chickeny, than the other two.

Flavourings

I want this soup to taste clean – the star anise, and the mushrooms, and most certainly the wine, can wait for a more decadent month. Skye Gyngell's mint, coriander and lemon juice are refreshing, but takes things too far east, and thyme and bay, the French variation given by Claudia Roden, overpower the chicken, as does tarragon, much as I like it. Saffron smacks too much of the decadence that has gone before – finally, I settle on the clean, sharp taste of parsley.

I also decide, in defiance of tradition, to add some fresh vegetables to the strained soup, in order to beef up the vitamin content. To be a true meal in a bowl, it needs some more body, though – and, after trying Claudia's egg and flour dumplings, and Lindsey's vermicelli and matzo balls, I settle on barley, inspired by Arnold Wesker's play of the same name. It feels more wholesome than dumplings or noodles, especially when I hit upon some wholegrain barley in an unusually busy health food shop.

January should be a time of financial, as well as physical belt tightening, so I've opted for Heston's chicken wings, instead of a whole bird – although the latter will, of course, make at least two meals, depending on the size of your family. They're cheaper, making it feasible to invest in a kilogram of good ones without breaking any resolutions, and easier to come by than stripped chicken carcasses, but any bony bits will do. Although purists may sneer, inspired by Lindsey Bareham's recipe, I've also added some chicken stock, to make damn sure of that flavour. Bland soup, as anyone who's ever been silly enough to try the cabbage soup diet will agree, is not conducive to healthy living.

Perfect chicken soup

Felicity's perfect chicken soup
Felicity's perfect chicken soup. Photograph: Felicity Cloake

Serves 6

1kg chicken wings or drumsticks or a mixture, plus a leftover chicken carcass if you happen to have one
2 sticks of celery, chopped
2 onions, chopped
3 carrots, 2 roughly chopped, one peeled and more finely chopped and kept separate
3 leeks, 2 roughly chopped, 1 more finely chopped and kept separate
Small bunch of parsley, separated into stalks and leaves
750ml chicken stock, cold
200g barley, cooked (pearl or wholegrain)

1. Put the chicken in a large pan and just cover with cold water. Bring to the boil and skim off the scum from the top – this is important, as it will give the finished soup a greasy, unpleasant flavour.

2. Add the celery, onions (if they're clean, there's no need to peel these), the roughly chopped carrots and leeks, the parsley stalks and the stock. Season with pepper. Simmer gently for about 2 hours.

3. Strain the soup through a fine sieve – you can pick the meat off the bones to add to the soup if you wish, although it may be rather tough. Return the soup to the pan, add the remaining finely chopped carrot and leek and cook for 10 minutes until these are soft.

4. Stir through the cooked barley, season to taste, and serve with the chopped parsley leaves on top.

Can anyone make better chicken soup than a Jewish mother, and can a good one really cure colds and soothe all ills?

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