We live in a world of strange substitutes. The candy shrimps and bananas he wants are now too vivid a pink and too garish a yellow. They have a memory of the taste I remember, but only because I remember the taste and add it to the present days sweets. My memory gives the imposter a veracity it would not have on its own. My friend asked me the other day what the role of memory was. Maybe it is this - to give us solace when the world is full of ersatz. But still I will get the artificially enhanced sweets and I'm sure my son will say they don't taste quite the way he remembered and he'll be right.
My son also paid me one of the highest Jewish mother compliments yesterday. In the land of Jewishprincessville (see yesterday's blog entry) he awarded me the equivalent of an MBE. He said my chicken soup was miles better than that which he had at a relative's house last week. He mentioned words like tastier, more flavour and richness and that the soup he had eaten had not been skimmed enough. I knew I had brought him up right.
I then had a conversation with Ralph about my outstanding chicken soup (and I am not even a little embarrassed to own this one). I think there are two secrets to my soup and I willingly give them up here to the chicken soup making public. First is CHICKEN - lots and lots of it. More chicken than you would think. I often use two whole chickens plus giblets for one large pot of soup and I'm sure that helps. The Marx Brothers once had a routine about making chicken soup in which they poured water through a chicken and I'm still haunted by the image of a pot of chicken-flavoured water. There is no chance of this if you use enough chicken. Also the kind of chicken makes a difference. I drive across town to get a boiling chicken from the closest kosher butcher. This is best for soup. A young, tasty free-range organic roasting chicken is fine at a pinch, but in this case you want a chicken like me - old, experienced, not good for regular roasting, but holding years of great flavour in its bones. Oh, and by the way, unless you like the taste of flavour-sapped old boiling fowl, be prepared to chuck out all the chicken, the flavour is in the soup! Generosity is the rule here.
My second absolutely necessary ingredient is the one that is most often substituted and in most cases, absolutely incorrectly. This is petrushka or parsley root. Petrushka is the white root that our Polish mothers always added to soup. It looks very similar to parsnip and this is where the mistake happens. So many young Jewish women remember the white root their mums used and since it's not something you find on the shelves of Pathmark or Safeway, they substitute parsnip, an altogether different tasting root that gives an odd sweetness to the soup. It looks remarkably similar but beware, it is a doppelganger, an evil imposter waiting to add an unwelcome taste to your soup. If you cannot get the right one, the root of the parsley, also called Hamburg parsley, then please use celeriac, the root of celery.
So, I started out bemoaning the disappearance of things I remember and end up giving away chicken soup secrets. For the rest of my recipe just get in touch and once I give you honorary Jewishprincessville citizenship, I might give you my exact recipe, though it's never the same twice.
Some substitutions work, recycled rubbish bin liners are fine instead of new platic bags. Some don't - saccharine will never be sugar, decaf will never taste like the real thing, those damned new low energy light bulbs stink, but memory helps add the missing ingredient, except in the case of chicken soup. Then only the real thing will do, and you can never substitute how much love goes into a pot of soup. I am sure of this.
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