Cook a large fat chicken in 3 quarts of water; add 1 onion, 2 carrots and 2 stalks of celery cut into small pieces and 1 cup of pearl barley. Let all cook until tender. Remove the chicken; season the soup to taste with salt and pepper; add some chopped parsley and serve hot with the chicken.
September 11 — No. 11
Polish
A one-pot barley and chicken soup of the kind Polish cooks call krupnik. The recipe assumes a stewing hen and a cook standing by; both assumptions need adjusting.
- The hinge: the barley will drink the pot dryA full cup of pearl barley swells three to four times in volume and will thicken 3 quarts of broth considerably over a long simmer. Either add the barley only for the last 40 minutes, or keep a kettle of hot water beside the pot and top up as it reduces.
- "A large fat chicken"This means a stewing hen or boiling fowl, 5 to 6 lb, an older laying bird with enough collagen and fat to make broth. A supermarket roaster of 4 to 5 lb is the closest substitute; it will be done in about 90 minutes rather than the 2 to 3 hours a true hen wants.
- Cook the bird whole, off the bone at the endTake the chicken out when the thigh reads 175F and the joints move freely. Pull the meat, discard skin and bones, and return the meat to the pot at serving so it does not shred to threads.
- Skim before the vegetables go inThe recipe omits it, but a fat hen throws a heavy grey scum in the first fifteen minutes. Skim it off, then add the onion, carrot and celery; the broth stays clear instead of cloudy.
- Season lateSalt is listed only at the end for good reason: three quarts reduces considerably over two hours, and barley absorbs seasoning unevenly. Salt after the barley is tender, then again just before serving.
- Vegetable proportionsOne onion, two carrots and two celery stalks is modest for 3 quarts. Doubling the carrot and celery is closer to the way krupnik is usually made, and a peeled potato cut into cubes in the last 20 minutes is a common addition.
- YieldSomewhat less than the 3 quarts of water you began with unless you top the pot up, serving 8 as a first course or 5 to 6 as a meal with the chicken meat in it. It thickens overnight; thin with stock or water when reheating.
Barley soup with a fowl is the Polish krupnik — from krupy, the word for hulled grains — one of the oldest and plainest dishes in the Polish repertoire, and confusingly the name of a honey-and-spice vodka as well. Barley grew where wheat struggled and was an everyday grain of Central and Eastern Europe long before the potato arrived; a soup built on it, stretched with a single boiling hen, fed a household for a day. Its appearance here belongs to the early twentieth-century "dishes of all nations" genre, in which American cookbooks offered a representative recipe per country. A Polish cook might well have finished the bowl with sour cream or a spoonful of dill alongside the parsley.