So here we are on another Love Thursday, and my true love is sick, so I am spending my day as all my foremothers before me (well, most of them, anyway) spent their days when someone they loved was ill. I am making chicken soup.
Though the impulse to make chicken soup whenever I hear the words "I'm sick" or "I don't feel so well" comes from love I received from my mother, and the soup she made was something she learned to make out of her love with the ingredients of her life, her places and her time, the soup I make is very different, the product of my life, all the places I've lived, and my love for that life and for all the people in it, all the people for whom I've made some evolution of this soup when they were ill -- including my mother, eventually.
I also learned this instinct from my father, who made soup, too, just the way he learned from his mother, barely deviating as far as I know from her ways. His soup always tasted different from my mother's. He used old world ingredients like barley and rutabegas, even though we didn't really like them, and being forced to eat them always made me wail, which enraged him. He missed his mother, who died badly the same year my older brother was born prematurely, weighing 2½ pounds, with a big tumour on his back, and with his legs all turned around. I think when my often angry father cooked soup and other things it was like when certain Asian people light joss sticks on ancestor shrines. It was how he could find her in his life.
It's supposed to be quintessentially Jewish, this chicken soup making practice, but you know every culture that has chicken has chicken soup. And it's not really Jewish when I do it, either, though I was raised and learned to make it in a Jewish household. I don't like to call myself Jewish because I think it insults people who sincerely practice, who sincerely believe. I don't practice; I don't believe. On a good day, I have doubts. The only thing I know for certain is this day and these materials in my hands, whatever today's might be. They came to me through work and, yes, love, and if I am diligent, they will leave my hands through the same means and not be wasted. Bigger than this is something I don't claim to know, or even care about, really.
Jewish or not, it has to be chicken. As much as it hurt me when I was vegan to discover, the lovely vegetarian broths which emulate chicken, even the lovely garlic broth in The Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas, do not actually have the same healing power. This has even been clinically proven. (Sorry, little chickens. You are as nutritious as you are delicious. Fat lot of good it does you personally.)
It has to be chicken, and it has to have garlic, ginger, cayenne, tomatoes, carrots, celery, and potatoes. Everything else is negotiable. If it doesn't have these things, it's not my soup and it won't do the same things my soup does. You cook chicken soup, too, and you use different ingredients? I'm sure it's wonderful, and I'm sure it allows your beloveds to drink in your love as physical nourishment and feel better because it's your love, over and above whatever scientifically proven things all chicken soup everywhere is capable of accomplishing. But when you are sick in my house, my love and my medicine taste like chicken, garlic, ginger, cayenne, tomatoes, carrots, celery and potatoes, and whatever else I have on hand, all cooked together for hours.
I will spend the whole day concocting this medicine, starting the moment I have left the bath and dressed. Its savory redolence will fill the house to the point where you will even be able to smell it through the most impacted sinuses. It will start to work on you even before you drink it, as you breathe it. You will still feel like crap, but cozy and embraced the way I felt when I was a child sick in a house that smelled like soup cooking all day -- unless my mother was sick and my father was cooking, and then I would feel scared. But don't worry. I have learned to temper the impatience for sick people I inherited from my father, and I will take care to make sure you will not feel scared.
My mother and father made each of their soups by boiling a whole chicken, skin and all, into a stockpot of seasoned water and assorted grains and vegetables until the flesh fell away from the bone into what was now a rich broth. They would burn their fingertips pulling bones out of the soup while it cooked, and they would always miss some little bits of bone here and there, so there was always an element of risk that you might choke or be stabbed by every spoonful.
I live a different life. I have had intimate friendships with small animals now dead. I am unable to handle a whole dead chicken body, because it reminds me too much of little bodies I knew and loved when they lived with me. It's almost tactile, this memory. The clamminess of a plucked dead chicken and the furry warmth of a playful cat are very different, of course, but there's something in the position, something in the way the ligaments connect the small avian limbs to the small avian body that carries me off to a terrible dark place, every time. All I have to do is look, but it's worse when I touch, and applying a knife to those little joints and ligaments is now out of the question. Besides, tears are not my favorite way to salt a soup made for healing.
Also, I live a life with a different sense of nutritional value than my parents lived, and certainly than their parents lived. I don't buy poultry with the skin on, because it's extra fat that we just don't need in our diet. Furthermore, the economy of my household and this era means I don't buy a chicken for one meal; I buy several units of different kinds of meat in easily adaptable forms and adjustable serving sizes. I buy 2½-lb. resealable plastic sacks of skinned, flash-frozen chicken breasts at Trader Joe's for about $7.00 a pop. At Whole Foods, I buy a couple pounds at a time of 97% fat-free ground sirloin which I separate into half-pound portions and freeze in separate containers, and a few whole turkey "tenderloins" which I also freeze individually. I have never slaughtered an animal or butchered my own meat. At the drop of a hat, though, I can cook something healthful and delicious and simple for one person or six.
In the 1930s and '40s, my paternal grandmother had two growing sons and a husband who gambled and screamed and hit. She had to feed them all on demand, on very little money, during a depression and a world war. In the 1960s and '70s, my parents had three children, and my mother, or my father if she was sick or away, always had to be ready to cook consistently for five people at nigh regimentally ordained intervals throughout every day. My mother would buy a few whole chickens for the freezer every week. This kind of difference between her life and mine, between her motivations around the very food we ate and mine around what we eat now, two generations later and 3000 miles away, is one of many that make my childhood seem like a foreign country. I can only imagine what my paternal grandmother would have thought of my kitchen.
But the thing is, when I make my modern-day, agnostic, love medicine soup, I start with a couple of pounds of defrosted skinless chicken breasts, and every time I do, I see the frowns on the faces of a hundred dead Jewish women, hear them cluck their ghostly tongues, and gesticulating emphatically, say as a chorus, "But all the flavor is in the skin and the bones; you've got to have the bones or it won't taste like anything; your soup will be poor and thin, like you don't really love him or can't afford better." And in my head, I yell at them and tell them they are wrong and ask them how many of their beloveds died of heart disease (though that's unnecessarily cruel, and another foolish invitation to dance with hubris because me and my own still might, but it's proof that even ancestresses I never met can still push my buttons), and what about the pools of grease that floated on the tops of their soups, and besides, who are they to lecture to me, they who feared seasoning that wasn't green or black or white? And they shrug and roll their eyes, as if to say, "Fine; don't listen to us; have it your own way, stupid stubborn young person who doesn't know anything" (even though I'm already older than several of them lived to be), but then they quiet down.
I spray my pan -- yes, pan, not stockpot, a huge, fancy, modern aluminum pan that conducts heat magnificently and cleans like a dream and that I only have because my true love bought it for me -- with olive oil. And yes, I spray it, I don't pour it in. I used to pour it in, just a tad, just enough to coat the bottom, but then some clever person invented spray-on olive oil and I found out about it. All the flavor, even less greasiness in the finished product. Magnificent!
I mince an entire head of garlic. If I have a ginger root, I grate up a tablespoon or so; if not, I sprinkle in bottled ground ginger. I can't tell you how much. I don't know. I do it 'til it looks right. I do the same thing with the cayenne powder, just sprinkle it in. The garlic is to strengthen the blood. The ginger is to soothe the digestion. The cayenne is to open up the breathing passages. The hundred dead Jewish ladies in my head who roll their ghost eyes and cluck their ghost tongues at me never used any of them. And when I was a child, I would have supported this choice, because I was afraid of hot things, too. They hurt my tongue, and when I refused to eat anything with them, I would be yelled at and sometimes hit or worse. I don't cook for children, though, and I don't yell at anyone for not liking what I do cook. But then, I wasn't raised in poverty, and I don't need to resent you if you can't or don't want to eat a whole bowlful of my time and resources, even if it's because you can't appreciate them, but especially if it's because you are sick.
When I had cats, they owned me wholly, and there was no animal product I could ever cook without giving them some. But cats can't eat onions. It gives them some kind of blood disease. They can have a tiny amount of garlic, but nothing properly oniony. So for many years, whenever I cooked soup it was a given they would ask for some, and I would give them some, and so for many years I cooked with no onions. Today I look in my fridge for an onion trying to feel like it's how I've always gone about this, trying for the hundredth time today not to feel loss that constricts my heart and stings my eyes, and find shallots. I pull out two large and very dark red ones, peel them down to the purple, and then slice them into thin purple-and-white targets. I sprinkle these into the bottom of the pan.
Shallots and mushrooms get on together like newlyweds. I see if I have any mushrooms, and find some aging crimini. I give them a good power-hosing to take off the slime, then cut them into three or four thick slices each. They will dance with the shallots in the hot oil, then cook down to slivers over the course of the day, infusing the soup with all their flavorful juices.
I have no fresh herbs on hand, so I open the spice cupboard. I need dusty green flavors, thyme for the shallots and mushrooms, sage for the chicken and potatoes, basil and oregano for the tomatoes to come, and marjoram to bind the flavors sweetly and gently. I sprinkle in enough. Again, there is no premade measure you can buy to help you duplicate this amount. I sprinkle past the point of freckling, but stop quite a ways before coating. I sprinkle 'til it smells right. Then I throw in a dash of celery seed to sharpen things a trace, to inspire salivation and perk up the patient's appetite.
In the fridge are three big tomatoes I bought for making sandwiches. There will be no sandwiches while my true love is sick; his tummy is tender, and he is finding swallowing challenging with his sore throat and horrible cough. These tomatoes, though, are loaded with things that cure colds, including Vitamins A and C, and they add another rich layer to the flavor base, so I cut every one into four big pieces and throw them into the pan, skin and seeds and all.
I cut my skinless chicken breasts into bite-sized pieces and throw them into the pan, too. I sneak in a turkey "tenderloin" also cut into bite-sized pieces. My true love needs his sleep, and the little bit of tryptophan in the turkey will help him get it. Then I give the pepper mill a hundred turns exactly. A hundred turns for a hundred sneezes, I think. Some goes up my nose with a whiff of shallot and cayenne, and then I do sneeze about a hundred times, until I can get to the cromolyn spray in the bathroom. My true love pops his head out of the room where he's telecommuting and worries aloud that I've caught his cold. "Pepper," I tell him, between sniffles, waving the mill so he can see, and he is relieved for now, even though we both know it's just a matter of time.
The pepper I use is a fussy "gourmet" blend of pink, white, green, and two different varieties of black peppercorns, all organically grown, of course. It costs about two and a half bucks for a resealable plastic envelope containing a portion of an ounce. The dead Jewish ladies in my head never saw anything like this, and are doubtful about the value. I do think the flavors are lovely, more complex than the straight single-variety black. I also like the pink peppercorns especially because I grew up in southern California with several pepper trees on my parents' property, two different kinds, both bearing pink peppercorns, both of which my parents assured us were inedible. Had we grown up now, in the age of gourmet peppercorns ubiquitous, I wonder how much money we children could have earned harvesting those little seeds, drying them, and selling them on the corner out front while blowing soap bubbles between passersby, maybe on the same table from which we hawked our fresh summer lemonade squeezed from lemons we picked off the neighbor's tree where it grew over our fence. "Gourmet Pink Peppercorns" -- and what would they be, 25 cents an ounce? -- packaged some way that cost my parents more than 25 cents a sale -- I can see it now. Perhaps they really were inedible, though. Perhaps it's just as well we never tested to be sure, though part of me regrets that little failure of courage. After all, ignoring such cautions is how I discovered pine nuts in the pine cones that fell from parking strip trees and broke open on the asphalt revealing treasure most delectable though complicated to harvest. But I digress.
I have compiled the soup base with everything that is in the pan right now, the oil, the meat, the herbs and spices, the shallots and garlic, the mushrooms, and the tomatoes. I sprinkle it all with sea salt lightly, put the lid on the big pan, set the heat very low, and walk away to do some chopping and to make my beloved some chamomile tea and wheat toast. I will come back when the scent of simmering flavors tells me it's time. I will just know. The dead Jewish ladies in my head nod approvingly.
Celery and carrots and potatoes. I must have celery and carrots and potatoes.
Today, I don't have celery, but I have celeriac, which is celery root, which is easier to digest, more flavorful and more nutritious, if less cheery julienned into white sticks than a handful of green crescent slices would be. I prefer to use both, but I only have one, so one is what I shall use. I peel it down until all the rough, indigestible skin is off it and make matchsticks of the crunchy, pale flesh.
I have many, many carrots. I went a little nuts when the farm was closing for the season and bought sack after sack of sweet and sandy carrots. They don't look like the carrots you buy at the grocery store. They are brighter orange and often come in funny shapes. I aver that they are at least four times as delicious, though scientists may argue with my numbers, and possessed of a texture that is at least five times more delightful, even now, after spending over a month wrapped in plastic in my fridge.
I have more in the freezer, sack after sack. The freezer is a treasure chest of rippled golden carrot coins and leaves of water-diamond-spangled lacinato kale I cleaned and stored there, as well as many other riches. We will plunder it together for other ingredients later. Now, though, I cut five or six of these carrots into bite sized logs. I do not peel them. I do not see the point.
The potatoes will be the second-to-last half-pound or so of Bintje I have left. Related to Yukon Gold, these are small and creamy-textured and have lasted quite well in the paper sack with the mesh front into which the farm stapled them. They are thickly covered with the soil in which they were grown. Signs at the farm informed buyers that the soil would help them keep, that cleaning potatoes makes them rot faster. I wash them happily today with the power hose and the green scrubby thingie that lives on the sink, then chop them into bite-sized pieces with the skin still on.
These potatoes don't look like store-bought potatoes, either, but that actually makes them better for my purposes, for my love medicine soup. Love at its strongest and most powerful usually has very little to do with material perfection.
I leave these cut-up roots on the cutting board on the counter and walk away for awhile. At some point, a simmering sound and tendrils of scent reach me in my studio and call me back to the kitchen. I lift the lid and see my soup base, ready now for what I call "the insoupination." Right now what I'm looking at is a slightly overcooked but still potentially tasty little stir-fry that I could caramelize slightly with the lid off the pan, then just add a couple of crunchy things to and throw over noodles in a trice. But that's a recipe for quick love, for urgently hungry love in the middle or at the end of a hard-worked single day, and this is slow love, love for a sick person that takes a whole day and lasts forever. So now, after just stirring things up a bit to make sure nothing's burnt or stuck and that everything mixes together nicely, I fill the rest of the pan with water.
I don't fill it all the way to the very edge. That would be silly. Even though I cook soup at a very low heat, why tempt it to boil over and mess up my stove? Besides, I have other things to put in the pot.
I wander to my pantry. I have a lot of dry goods. Once upon a time, I had no money and no one to care for me, and that's when I learned about dry goods. There was a winter I starved in Alaska. There was a summer I starved in Santa Cruz. Literally starved. I would go literally two weeks at a time sometimes with no food whatsoever except maybe a pitcher of cranberry tea made using a teabag left behind by a previous tenant or hot cocoa mix laced with nondairy creamer for extra calories I'd cadge several times a day from the coffee room of whatever office where I was temping to earn not quite enough money to cover my rent. When I did have money to buy food, I learned four hundred different ways to fill myself with elbow macaroni for under fifty cents a plate. I learned about beans and rice. When I was through these stages, I had my "As God is my witness" moment, and I have never been without a pantry packed with dry goods since.
And I always put some dry goods into my soup, whether it's medicine soup or not. For the medicine soup I throw in a cup of lentils, a cup of brown rice, a half-cup of split peas. It's almost a complete protein right there; all it needs is some corn. I don't use any of the myriad dry beans -- navy beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, black turtle beans, garbanzo beans -- for any kind of medicine soup because they're too hard on the digestion, but I have them. (I always have them now, no matter how impoverished I ever get.) I always put in some dry goods of some sort, no matter what, because they taste good, plus they're packed with B vitamins for the nerves and important minerals for strength. I put them in because I have them. I have them because I'm strong, strong enough to have survived to be loved and cared for. I put them in today to give my sickly true love extra strength. In a few hours, they will be soft and delicious.
I turn the heat down, down, down, set the timer for an hour, and walk away. When the hour bell rings, I stir and turn the heat up a little. I forget to leave the lid off, though, and the soup boils over a tad, and the fire underneath complains loudly. Shoot. I take the lid off and walk away again.
The hour bell rings again. I stir again. I scrape from the bottom. I remember my father teaching me to scrape from the bottom. My father taught me how to cook more than my mother, actually. She taught me to bake. He taught me how to cook entrées and sauces and breakfasts.
My father only taught me one recipe from his mother, for spaghetti, but he taught me all the techniques on which my cooking knowledge and ongoing curiosity are founded. He was an adventurous eater and a good cook but a cruel teacher. He taught me to make a roux. He taught me to scrape from the bottom. "From the bottom, dammit" he would yell, grabbing my small arm so hard it hurt, wrenching it and me until my face felt the steam of whatever we were cooking. I learned not to cry out, because then he might hit, too. But I learned what he meant about scraping from the bottom.
The All-Clad pan my true love bought me is smooth and shiny. Even when things burn onto the bottom, it doesn't take much effort to scrape them off and dissolve their caramelly goodness into the broth. I can afford to stir my medicine soup gently, and since the pan is not deep, it's easy to get everything up and turn it all over, piece by piece, drop by drop. The only time I ever burn anything to the point of ruining it is when I forget to check what I'm cooking. That's why I set the timer.
The stock is greatly reduced at this point, having been absorbed into the dry goods even as it has also been rejuvenated slightly by liquid leaving the juicier ingredients. I bring the root vegetables to the stove and mix them in. Since the liquid has reduced, I put the lid back on to keep more from escaping into the air. I set the timer again, and go away to write.
The timer goes off, but I don't hear it, because I'm far away thinking about my ancestresses and my previous selves. No matter. I remember in time because the smell of what I'm cooking reminds me. I think of those cartoons where cooking scents are represented by steam curls that turn into fingers that tickle noses and beckon, teasingly.
I stir everything again, again scraping from the bottom. Now it's time to go to the freezer. What shall I choose? The last time we were ill, I chopped the now ice-jeweled kale leaves finely and threw them in, but I didn't like the finished texture. They are good in quicker soups, in simpler soups, not so much in medicine soups that take all day. In medicine soups they turn to globs of dark green tangled mush, unappealing and complicated for the spoon.
I already have carrots in the soup. Broccoli would be nice in a different soup, but is too gas-inducing for a sick person. Besides, it overcooks so easily, and then it's nasty, mushy and grossly cabbagey in that soaked, burnt sock kind of way. Corn, though, corn would be good. More protein. More gentle cleansing of the innards. More sweetness of warmer days. Corn is my true love's very favorite vegetable, and when I use it, he knows I'm thinking of him, specifically. (I use it in almost everything I make.) Haricots verts, those skinny, Frenchified string beans, would be lovely broken into bites. Their brilliant emerald will make up visually for the lack of sliced celery, even while they enrich the value of my poor, thin, chicken-skinless and chicken-boneless love soup with all their healing vitamins (A, B, K) and strengthening minerals.
I notice that the lentils and split peas are still not quite all the way rehydrated. They're still a little hard and rough. I add a little more water, just half a cup, knowing the corn and the beans will add a little, too, as they mellow into the soup. I won't cook this long enough for them to fade or get mushy. When I stop the cooking, the carrots will still be a little crunchy, and the potato chunks and frozen additions will still be toothsome. This is what slow cooking in a shallow pan graduated carefully by ingredient will get you. You get richness, and you also get a sense of freshness.
The "end" product half an hour later will be several quarts of dense stew. It's hardly poor or thin. In fact, it's practically solid. I will ladle it -- scoop it, really -- into storage containers and pop them in the fridge. When it's time to feed my love, as soon as he says he can eat something, I will take some of this stew and put it in a saucepan with just enough water added to make broth, but not so much as to dilute the flavor. The flavor is intense, bird-y and herb-y and deeply vegetable, laced through with tingly ribbons of spice, and it has cooked long enough that all the tastes inside have met and kissed passionately, but not so long that there is only one taste in any mouthful. When I reheat it, I sprinkle in a touch more cayenne -- just enough, no more -- for life and openness. I'll wait until the liquid just boils, then I will ladle it into one of those cozy bowls with a handle on it like a mug so my love can hold it and be warmed by it through his kind, gentle hands without spilling even while he drinks up its heat and feels it inside, too.
My love will nap a long time. There will be more soup than he can eat in one sickness, but none will be wasted, because in a day or so I will catch whatever he's got, and if he's well enough by then, he can feed some of my own love medicine back to me. And if he's not, I can keep on feeding it to both of us 'til we don't need it anymore.
It's supposed to be Jewish, this instinct to make soup for the beloved sick, but it's bigger than one thing. Everyone who cooks knows about the love medicine that comes from his or her own pot, and every culture with chicken has chicken soup.
When we first lived together, my true love and I went to the orthodox Jewish wedding of a very close, deeply loved friend of mine. (She has made me soup. I have made her quiche. It just worked out that way.) Her wedding was L.A. hippie orthodox; the rabbi wore tennis shoes but still wouldn't shake the hand of any woman but his wife, who did not wear a wig or headscarf. The bride's dress was ecru and bare-shouldered, and while the band was Klezmer, the food was vegan, not even a single salmon puff to be found.
My true love is not now nor has he ever been Jewish. He is half-Mexican and nearly half-Pennsylvania Dutch, attended Christian schools and once wanted to be a Catholic priest. At a ceremony the day before the wedding, he wore a tallis and yarmulke to be respectful in a multipurpose room transformed into an orthodox synagogue by a curtain run down the middle to separate the mens' folding chairs from the womens'. He was asked to carry the Torah during its traditional tour of the room for blessings and kisses, we thought because no one realized he wasn't Jewish, but in fact (we found out later) because he was the biggest guy in the room. We both towered over everyone in the room and the curtain dividing our sides. At the wedding, we sat at the bride's table with other close friends, plus the rabbi and his wife. We all talked and laughed uproariously.
After the wedding, my friend told me the rabbi thought I was very nice, but that "the relationship [my relationship] with the non-Jew [would] never last." The relationship with the non-Jew has lasted nearly twelve years, slightly longer than the marriage we witnessed -- which, don't get me wrong, is still alive and well, too.
Every time I make my agnostic love medicine soup for the non-Jew, the one who bought me the expensive cooking pans that make scraping from the bottom so easy, the one who loves me more than anyone else ever has in my entire life except maybe my mother and my cats, I celebrate this, in my dull, quotidian, not supernaturally spiritual way.
Love, when it's real, is bigger than labels and divisions. Love doesn't always fit neatly, and it doesn't have to.
Happy Love Thursday, everyone.
_____
Learn about the nutritional value of every ingredient at NutritionData.com. (No, that's not a paid plug; this is a phenomenal free resource. Incidentally, I learned about it from the woman who was the bride at that wedding.)
Learn about the properties of all kinds of herbs with The Herb Book by John Lust. (Yeah, I think that is his real name, and anyway, I did not make it up.)
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