December 2024
Helaine Ortmann
When I make chicken soup, I think of my mother; when I sip it, I feel warm, happy and loved.
Growing up, I remember being in the kitchen, watching her wrestle with the soup chicken she brought home from the kosher butcher.
She washed it, cut it up, removed the skin, plucked any feathers, sprinkled the pieces with kosher salt, and let them sit for an hour or so on a board on the counter. It was messy, sticky, and at times bloody; but nowhere near as awful, she told me, as shopping with her parents at the downtown market for a live chicken she was entrusted to hold in a wagon on the way home.
This was all something I wanted no part of, until Friday nights, when we sat down together as a family to enjoy our Shabbos meal.
There were Sephardic-style foods passed down from my father’s Bulgarian-Romanian side of the family like hot stuffed peppers with fresh challah to mop up the juice, roasted rice made in a yellow vintage pyrex casserole with a ridged glass cover (now mine and exclusively saved for making roasted rice like my mother and paternal grandmother did), as well as pastel, a ground beef meat pie in a flour-oil-water salted pastry dough. These dishes co-mingled amiably with my mother’s much anticipated chicken soup with lokshen or rice, breaded chicken breasts, overdone vegetables, and dessert.
It was not until after I had my own children that I decided it was time. To make soup. Why would I have made attempts any earlier? My mom’s soup — in flavour, colour and shimmer from trace parts of fat — was peerless. Everyone said so; even my cousins. “The gold standard” wrote my brother, a serious foodie and French-trained chef, in the January 2020 obit that summed up mom’s life, pleasures and talents.
From memory and with the assistance of the “Second Helpings Please!” cookbook my mother was prescient enough to gift me when I left home in 1977 for my first job; and, for the well-being of our (then) two young sons, I set out to earn the title of balabusta (and expert chicken-soup maker) I so coveted.
After all, wasn’t it a young Malcolm Gladwell who postulated in his 2008 book “Outliers” the theory that 10,000 hours of practice was the magic number for greatness? Surely, mom, over her long lifetime, achieved this status.
Fast forward. When I shop, I don’t ask for a “nice” pullet the way my mother did. That’s why I add bones to fortify my soup. The differences don’t end there. The chicken I buy is from the kosher section of the grocery store; it is pre-cut into eighths; and the packaging assures me it is already cleaned and salted.
But after this, I am one with history, tradition, and my mother.
I remove the skin using designated meat scissors, carefully drop the pieces into an enamel-coated pot filled almost to the brim with cold water, and, like a doting parent, I hover until the water boils and I can remove the schum with my fine mesh skimmer; a strangely satisfying process. Then, in go the following: two to three carrots, the same number of celery stalks, one onion, a parsnip, a handful of fresh parsley, and salt to taste. I stir, loosely cover the pot, and let it simmer two hours or so for the alchemy to happen.
Once the soup is cool, I discard all the vegetables except for the carrots (I savour them as long as the soup lasts), remove the chicken, and refrigerate it overnight to let the fat congeal on top. Like renowned cook Noreen Gilletz, I take off the schmaltz to avoid “unwanted calories or cholesterol” (one less medication), then bag the precious elixir to store in the freezer.
My eldest son, now vegetarian, no longer eats my soup; my younger son does and receives a “care package” every time he comes home to visit. My husband, bless him, patiently waits for holidays and special occasions when I unlock it from the vault.
As a retired person living in Hamilton, Helaine seeks out opportunities in everyday life to nourish mind, body and spirit.
