Chicken Soup with Matzo Balls

Growing up in Maine, I was sadly underexposed to ethnic food.  It was a bit bland ethnically there at the time, and the same might be said for the food.  I somehow survived.  I guess there is some truth to ignorance being bliss.

I remember vividly this:  my mother, laid up with the flu one freezing cold winter, was bedridden for several days.  I was left to fend for myself: I scavenged for peanutbutter crackers and fruit snacks, leaving a trail of crumbs and sticky fingerprints everywhere I went, hair wildly knotted into a bird nest and a feral look about me as one might get in these situations.    

A kindly neighbor heard of the plague in the house and brought by a big pot of some soup and helped me heat it up on the stove before making a hasty and gracious retreat.  It was unlike any soup I had ever tried at the time.

See, kindly neighbor had converted to Judaism upon meeting her husband, and she readily assimilated and introduced us to a few Jewish specialties and traditions.  Even though her version came from a mix, soup with matzo balls became my go-to sickly comfort food.   The pillowy eggy dumplings of matzo, the yellow gelatinous salty broth.  It heals you, I swear it.  I'm probably not remember this completely correctly, but upon a few sips of this exotic brew, my mother jumped from her sickbed and started doing a jazzercise workout.  True story.  

Years later when I moved to New York I managed without even trying to rent a flat  with Katz's Deli directly between my front door and the nearest subway stop.  It was fate, I tell you.  The Lower East Side institution Jewish deli usually had a tour bus or two pulled up to the curb during dinner hours but being a local meant I could get take out without battling the masses of women faking orgasms at the dinner table.  They had a weird cafeteria-style ticket system they made you go through, and a surly security guard making sure you didn't make off with a salami or get too Meg Ryan in the dining area, but that was part of the charm.  If you ordered one of their enormous pastrami sandwiches at the counter, specifying that you wanted it "juicy" (which was code for nothing but the best fattiest bits) and made an obvious move towards the tip jar, you would end up with some insane mountain of food that breached what could safely be labeled as a sandwich.  Me, a lapsed vegetarian, would take four of five days of dedicated nibbling to get through that monstrosity.  

The best thing though was their chicken soup with matzo balls.  Being a shrine to excess, naturally the matzo balls were the size of softballs.  I have no idea what their secret is to get such a giant dumpling to cook through, stay fluffy and not fall apart.  Surely, it is pure wizardry on their part.  Any day I was feeling under the weather, I would stop in on my way home from work and leave minutes later with a quart container of fatty rich chicken soup with two enormous grapefruit-size matzo dumplings that displaced a great deal of broth.  It almost made me look forward to flu season.

Now living in London, I wouldn't even know where to look.  There's a bagel place on Brick Lane, and a couple salt beef places in Soho, but there isn't really an institution locally,  and certainly not one on my way home from work. 

Happily, with a little doing, a bit of comfort happens easily in the home kitchen.  After quizzing various friends about it, absolutely no one seemed to have heard of this or ever tried it, which I find quite shocking coming from such a worldly metropolis.  What on earth do Londoners eat when they catch a cold?  Still, I was able to find Matzo meal fairly easily and that's really all you need.  This soup doesn't work without it.  

The most important element of this soup is the stock.  Don't be tempted to cheat on this step and use store-bought cartons or -worse- bullion cubes, but save all your chicken bones and droopy celery and limp carrots in the freezer and make yourself a fine all-day-on-the-stove stock.  It's a good way to use up sad vegetables and it freezes really well.  The bones here are key: they will give the stock a ton of flavor, but also a silky gelatinous texture.  If you haven't had a chicken in a while, I find the local butcher often carries freshly made stock.  It's a little bland, but the silky chicken fat flavor is there.  

Oh!  I'm happy to say that this could easily be adapted to be vegetarian, and I made a vege version for years.  Leave out the chicken and sub vege stock and you have a decent, although Bubbes everywhere will be needing a fainting couch if you declare this too loudly.  Traditionally, carrots and perhaps celery seem to be the go-to veggies in this, but I've also used fennel and it's given it a nice flavor.  I'm big into tinkering, and for some reason, this soup just wants to be the simplest form it could possibly be.  Feel free to go wild, but my experimental days with this soup are well behind me.

You can also make the matzo balls the day before, making assembly quite effortless.

Another thing:  while I can find goose fat a plenty in London, schmaltz is mysteriously missing from the animal-fat section of the grocery.  It's chicken fat, and once again, I'm upsetting Bubbes everywhere by saying:  I just use melted butter when I can't find schmaltz.  It tasted fine.  

Recipe: Chicken Soup with Matzo Balls

Serves 6, or an unwell person for a few days

For the Matzo balls:

• 3 large eggs, beaten to blend
• 75 g (¾ cup) matzo meal
• 60 g (¼ cup) schmaltz (chicken fat), melted
• 45 ml (3 tablespoons) club soda
• 6 ml (1¼ teaspoon) kosher salt or sea salt

For the Soup:

1500 ml (6 cups) chicken stock

• 2 boneless chicken breast
• 2 small carrots, peeled, sliced ¼” thick on a diagonal
• Kosher or sea salt
• handful of coarsely chopped fresh dill
• Coarsely ground fresh black pepper

• In a large bowl, mix beaten eggs, matzo meal, schmaltz (or melted butter), club soda, and salt.  Cover and chill at least 2 hours, but if you forget about or plan to forget about it, it's just fine to leave it over night.
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  • Bring chicken stock to a boil in a large saucepan and another pot of salted water to a boil simultaneously.  Add chicken breast to the stock until cooked through, about 20 minutes.  Remove cooked chicken from the stock.  Once cool enough to handle, shred against the grain of the meat.  Add carrots to the stock; season with salt. Reduce heat and simmer until carrots are tender, 5–7 minutes.  Add the shredded chicken.
  • Meanwhile, while the chicken is cooking in the stock, make the matzo balls. Scoop out tablespoonful portions matzo ball mixture and, using wet hands, gently roll into walnut-sized balls.  I find the smaller sizes work better for me- they cook through nicely and don't get shaggy and fall apart in the soup- but feel free to go wild and make an ostrich egg sized one if the mood strikes you.  
  • Add matzo balls to water and reduce heat so water is at a gentle simmer (too much bouncing around will break them up). Cover pot and cook matzo balls until cooked through and starting to sink, 20–25 minutes.  Don't be tempted to cheat and cook the dumplings directly in the soup- they will break down a bit and your cooking water will be unappealingly cloudy.
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  • Using a slotted spoon, transfer matzo balls to bowls. Ladle soup over, top with dill, and season with pepper.

Enjoy, and be healed.  

Blood Orange and Burrata Salad

By way of introduction:  I am a burrata junkie.  

The first time I traveled to Italy, I rode the rails with my discounted eurorail pass.  It was autumn, the weather was fine, and I had no real idea what these places I was to visit might be all about.  Venice to Milan to Bologna to Florence to Rome, I was getting off the train to spend a few unplanned days in each place, staying in cheap hostels and wearing out my one pair of boots that I had brought along.  I found the Roman hostels to be a bit sketchy, so I took the step of then renting a tiny flat for a few weeks in the Roman suburbs.  It was a pretty sublime introduction to some beautiful old cities of one of the most touristed countries in the world.  Although I must admit I was pretty sick of Jesus art fairly quickly, I was lucky in my experiences and really enjoyed my time there, and after a while smiling and saying my Per Favors and Grazies came automatically.  

This is the kind of slow travel that I love.  Really taking your time to get to know a place, observing the rhythms of daily life.  Ah, and the food!  The food, the food.  I almost never eat Italian food outside of Italy because the simple magic of anything grown or made there instantly dissolves once you hit the border.  Blessed with pleasant climates and fertile soil, the produce is outstandingly good, very fresh, and lovingly procured each morning by nonnas and chefs alike at the local outdoor market that would pop up along the sidewalk and be gone by noon.

While in Rome, I would roll out of bed in the morning, take a two-minute shower before the tiny hot water tank ran out of love for me, and then head down to my local outdoor market.  Every morning, I would seek out some fresh bread, fruit and cheese and have myself a little morning picnic Tiber-side while watching men in natty slim-fitting suits and women with the highest of heels and chic dresses hustle off to work before I headed over to check out the countless galleries and ancient monuments that make up Rome. 

Having a home base outside of the tourist zone was the best idea I could have possibly had.  Not only was it filled with friendly cafes and traditional osterias serving loads of good food and wine, it was remarkably free of the busloads of tourist, and the dining options much cheaper and better than the scrum of over-cheesed pasta-slinging mama mia joints.  I was on a tight in-between-jobs budge but I would like to think I ate like royalty every meal.  In my terrible pick-it-up-as-I-need-it Italian, I would do quite a bit of guess work as to what I might be ordering for dinner, as English was not the default language in this part of town, asking the waiter shyly, "si tratta di un pesce? è un vegetale?" just to make sure I wasn't getting tripe or brains or something else that I find unsavory.  Happily, I am an adventurous eater.

It was always delicious- stuffed squash blossoms and homemade pastas with bitter greens and chili and olive oil, a jug of house wine on the table for a pittance that didn't make you pucker, and a bottle of grappa plunked down on the table once I had paid my bill.  I would dutifully take a tearful sip and then run before they poured me another of the grappa.  They are married to tradition, but oh! what tradition it is.

In these exchanges at the morning market, I was constantly trying the new varietals of things I had never heard of or seen before, which I found much more enjoyable than merely guessing at what I would get from a restaurant menu.  The vendors, friendly and chatty, would help me choose my fruit and send me on my way.  Two things that I discovered in that market- these brown pears (like boscs?) that were the size of my head.  I would need two hands to lift them to my face, and proceed to slick  myself with pear juice with every bite.  I have yet to find a pear that good again, and I'm back to being somewhat content with your every day run of the mill pear, as hard and flavorless as it might be.  The other thing that I ate voraciously and without tire was a cheese, dripping with cream, distinctively topknot-wrapped in bright green leaves.

Burrata.

Which means "buttered".

This cheese is indescribably good.  I will spend the rest of my life chasing my burrata high, looking for that perfectly creamy dumpling of mozzarella and cream.  When it's fresh, it's the only food you will want for the rest of your life.  It has humble beginnings: cheesemakers in Puliga (the wild and rural heel of the boot) would use their leftover mozzarella scraps to form a ball of cheese, which was filled with cream.  This is what they would take home at the end of the day to feed their family.  That green leaf that it is tied with?  The shade of green it is lets your know if its past its prime, as you only want it within the first 24 hours of its life, and never ever more than 48.  This is the mayfly of cheeses.

That is why this is so precious.  You will never get burrata as good as that.  Even being in Rome I was stretching the geographical boundaries of where good burrata can be found.  If you can get fresh burrata any where else, it's got a slight sourness to it, the crust is too tough and rubbery.  It's jet-lagged.  Still, sub par burrata is better than no burrata at all.  I continue to try and recapture that feeling of Rome.  

After I would wolf down my pear, use the fresh bread to sop up the leaking cream of the milky fresh burrata, I would feel much happiness.  True, I was a stranger here- I knew no one and didn't speak the language and had spent the past couple months without hearing or seeing anyone familiar- but a sense of contentment and belonging would take over and I would cheerily wander around until lunch time, where an excuse to have a pastry or gelato would present itself.  The Romans were kind to me: covered in pear juice and an unexpected spurt of cream on my jacket and just generally looking sticky with traces of soap still in my hair, they never turned me away.  I guess the fact that the city's founders were raised by wolves gave me a bit of a pass on that one.

That brings me to the recipe.  I am frequently at war in the kitchen- coaxing sauces not to curdle, violently mincing garlic, getting the perfect crust to form on a lamb chop while keeping it perfectly pink on the inside.  I'm a mess, I make a mess, and yet I enjoy it thoroughly.  I feel like home cooking is a lost art, something we are all too busy to take the time to do.  Yet...it can be very simple, and much healthier than something that came from the store in cellophane and a way to make happy connections with our pasts.

Since moving to London I have been much dismayed by the state of vegetable cooking here.  If I'm at a pub and order a side of vege what I get is this:  A dish.  It has vegetables in it.  The vegetables are usually peas and or carrots, sometimes broccoli or green beans.  They appear to have come from a bag in the freezer.  They have been microwaved until hot, then plunked down in front of me without a squeeze of lemon or garnish or ceremony.  They taste, predictably, like the seventh level of hell if vegetables went to hell.  They make me want to cry they are so terrible.

And we wonder why people aren't eating more vegetables.

Arrive our hero, Yotam Ottolenghi.  He opened a few upscale deli-style cafes around London, and a posh place in Soho called Nopi where the beautiful people go.  While I'm usually not a fan-girl of celebrity chefdom, this man does magic with vegetables.  He respects them, he coaxes the best out of them with unexpected twists and flavors.  I ran out and bought his cookbook "Plenty", and I can honestly say that I haven't had a failure yet.  Swoon.

This recipe you won't find in any of his cookbooks as far as I know.  I had a dish at Nopi a little while back and it's easy to recreate at home.  They had me at burrata and it was unexpected and delicious in the the mad combination of pieces that made it whole.  I wrote it down the best of my memory and make this as my go-to when I can be bothered to do anything with burrata upon bringing it home instead of just tearing into it like a crazed she-wolf the moment the door slams behind me.  The ingredients look weird together, but TRUST ME, they come together to make something tangy and bitter and spicy and creamy and sweet and it will be gone before you know it.   It's perfect for winter, when blood oranges and their dramatic ruby blush are at their peak but you could probably sub some clementines or tangerines if need be.  It's my favorite kind of meal- a few perfect ingredients thrown together without too much washing up to do afterwards.

If you absolutely can not find fresh burrata where you live, my heart cries for you, but you could probably do just fine with a milky buffalo's milk mozzarella.

Recipe:  Blood Orange and Burrata Salad
Serves 2

2 blood oranges
1 ball of the freshest Burrata you can manage to acquire
1 tablespoon/14 g of coriander seeds
A couple handfuls of lettuce leaves: lambs lettuce would work nicely here
1 teaspoon /7ml runny honey
good balsamic vinegar and olive oil for drizzling
Sea salt
Bread, for serving

Peel the blood oranges and roughly chop or tear them into wedges.  Transfer them into a serving bowl or big plate along with the juices that have made a mess of your cutting board along with the lettuce.

Heat a fry pan on medium-low heat.  Add the coriander seeds.  Toss them around near constantly and watch them like a hawk.  They will become pleasantly fragrant, turn a toasty brown color, and begin to make soft popping noises.  Cut the heat when they begin to pop and don't let them cook for a second more.  This should only take a couple minutes.  Do not be tempted to skip this toasting step!  It transforms the seeds into earthy, lemony little bits of popcorn.

Place the burrata on the plate atop your salad and oranges.  Drizzle with honey, a little olive oil and balsamic.  Sprinkle with sea salt and the toasted coriander seeds.  Serve with good bread to mop up all the goodness at the bottom of the plate.  Pour a glass of wine and enjoy la dolce vita!