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Southern Chicken Soup
1 3-lb. fowl 2 qts. cold water 3 tablespoons cooked rice 2 teaspoons salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon minced parsley Cut all the meat from fowl, reserving the breast whole. Cut the rest into bits, break the bones, and put them with the meat and salt water into the kettle. Place the breast on top of the other meat. Cook four hours. Remove the breast as soon as tender. Skim often at first, strain and add rice and breast cut in dice, also seasonings and parsley.
A clear chicken broth built from a whole bird, with the breast poached in the same pot and returned as diced meat. The technique still works; only the bird and the skimming need translating.
- "Fowl" is not a broilerA fowl in these books is a mature laying hen — tough, fatty, and deeply flavored, which is why four hours is appropriate. A supermarket roasting chicken of the same weight will give thinner broth in half the time; look for a stewing hen, or add a few wings for body.
- Pull the breast earlyThis is the hinge of the recipe. The breast is done in 25 to 35 minutes at a bare simmer; leave it in for the full four hours and the diced meat you add at the end will be dry and stringy. Lift it out, cool it, and hold it aside.
- Simmer, do not boil"Cook four hours" over a modern burner invites a rolling boil, which emulsifies the fat and clouds the broth past saving. Keep it at the barest tremble, uncovered or with the lid ajar.
- SkimmingThe gray foam rises in the first twenty minutes and should be lifted off then; after that there is little point. Easier still, chill the strained broth and lift the solid fat from the top the next day.
- QuantitiesTwo quarts of water may come down to something like six cups over four hours, depending on the pot and the heat — about four servings as a first course. The three tablespoons of cooked rice is a garnish, not a body; use a half cup if you want the soup to eat as a meal.
- Seasoning at the endTwo teaspoons salt goes in at the start with the water, as written, but taste again after straining. A broth that has reduced by a quarter will read saltier than it did in the pot.
- Break the bonesWorth doing, and worth doing thoroughly — cracking the leg and back bones exposes cartilage and connective tissue, whose collagen is the source of the gelatin that gives the broth its texture.
This is the plain end of a tradition of chicken soups that used the whole bird thriftily: the breast served as meat, the rest given over to broth. Broths of this kind were also standard sickroom food; a clear chicken soup with a little rice was commonly prescribed for convalescents, and recipes for it appear in many general cookbooks of the period. The stewing hen it depends on was then simply what a chicken was once it stopped laying, a bird largely absent from retail counters now.