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.
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.
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.
- 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.
- Using a slotted spoon, transfer matzo balls to bowls. Ladle soup over, top with dill, and season with pepper.
Enjoy, and be healed.
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