CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE HOME

The Salisbury steak. Now I really liked that particular TV dinner. And I liked that brownie that came with it, even though most of it was burned tight to the tinfoil sides. As a kid growing up in the ‘70s, I ate a lot of TV dinners. It was what my mom could manage for we three kids when she got home from the office each night. That or crock pot chicken strewn over instant rice.

I don’t come from a cooking family. My Irish grandmother taught me how to pour the perfect glass of beer but did not leave any other legacy that required firing up the stove. My mother was a single career woman who taught me many valuable skills: how to write a killer resume, how to drive a stick shift, how to stare down an angry man twice my size. She made me take typing but let me opt out of home Economics. I moved out at 18 able to write the perfect business letter, but ignorant of the ins and outs of the baked potato or roast chicken.

But that hardly mattered in college and beyond. I loved to eat, and so I surrounded myself with friends who knew their way around a kitchen. In college I often traded my typing skills (90 wpm, thank you, Mom) for good home cooking. A 25-page term paper equaled, in my estimation, a three-course meal (without wine). I admired people who could turn a handful of ingredients into a lovely and delicious meal, and on one or two occasions, I tried to emulate them. Alas, my failures were legendary, and I decided that my talents obviously lay elsewhere. I avoided all things domestic – the kitchen in particular – for my entire ‘20s.

But all that changed when I started my family in my early ‘30s. Some strange compulsion to nourish my husband and infant child pulled me back into the kitchen to try my hand anew. My husband bought a vegetarian cookbook and together we tried our hand at various, allegedly simple meals. Vegetarian lasagna. Greek Salad. Vegetable cous-cous. His turned out fine, as I recall. Mine were disasters.

This time, instead of being discouraged, I persevered. After an entire young adulthood spent spurning the domestic arts, I was surprised to find myself yearning to cultivate a home and hearth of my own. I slowly started acquiring better equipment, copper-bottomed pots, wooden spoons, ceramic baking dishes. I took a sudden interest in the Food section of my local newspaper. I started clipping recipes. I started getting ideas.
Sometimes a dish turned out – the vegetable cous-cous was an early favorite, as was the Indian chicken and tomatoes, and I’d serve my family proudly on mismatched plates. Oftentimes, however, it did not turn out. I spent an entire morning once boiling and mashing organic carrots so my daughter could have “superior” home made baby food. Three hours and most every pot I owned later, I had my bowl of orange mush. The baby turned her nose up it.

But my thinking about cooking had fundamentally changed. Before I got married and became a mother myself, I hadn’t understood the connection between food and family. I hadn’t understood the way a culinary routine or tradition, in essence, passes down the love through the generations.

Every friend I had with cooking skills told me the same thing: they learned to love food and its preparation because they watched their mothers cook for them. They helped her in the kitchen. They sat down to hot meals as a family, every night around the table. Food and the preparing of it became entwined with their sense of self, home, and belonging. Their stories made me think of large, extended families in gracious East Coast homes; traditions; coherence. Every one of them had a fond memory of something from their childhood kitchens, some dish their mother or grandmother made especially for them. Nanna’s artichokes, or Mom’s special meatballs. I envied them their memories. My Southern California home was short on traditions, but lively with books, music and laughter. But then again, I fondly remember Salisbury steak.

So I got back in the kitchen and tried again, re-measured and re-sifted. I discovered Mark Bittman’s life-changing big yellow book, “How to Cook Everything.” And every night I went back in there, hoping to stumble on a tradition of my own to pass down to my children.

When my daughter was a toddler, one of the only foods she’d eat was the brand name chicken soup from a local grocery chain. It had noodles and veggies, and heck, she had to eat, so I made her a can of it every day and joined her for lunch. She pronounced it “Chicken No-No” soup, and the name stuck.

Then I read an article about how chicken soup really did have healing properties, and how almost every ethnic group had their own version of chicken soup. It came with a few basic recipes, and I was inspired to try my own.

The concoction I created wasn’t half-bad, as evidenced by the fact that my daughter, then in first grade, ate the whole first effort. These days, she’s hovering around 10, and is a full-blown kid with strong opinions of her own – and my home-made Chicken No-No soup is a favorite. She doesn’t want the store-bought soup anymore. “Make your home-made soup, Mom,” she says, and of course, what can I say? I serve it to her steaming, with bread, and she devours two whole bowls of it. She often eats her younger brother’s portion of it, too.

Here’s where I’ll confess to a fantasy with more than a little hubris. In it, I imagine my daughter, now a young woman of 19, sitting in a café in Paris, where she’ll be studying the art of pastry. And she’ll be a tall, gorgeous young woman who all the French men will covet, because although she’s an American she is tempered by her bookish demeanor and her laughing yet haughty green eyes. And she’ll say, “I know you said this bistro had the most exceptional chicken soup in Paris, Etienne, but you know, my mother made a superior version.” And Etienne will try to argue, but my daughter will wave him away. “Argue all you will. My mother’s is better.”

Telling a Frenchman that your mother’s chicken soup is better than any in all of France….now that’s every mother’s fantasy!

Regardless of what my daughter ends up doing, I smile when I think she’ll remember the chicken No-No soup. When she’s just a bit older, I’ll teach her how to make it herself, but I hope she’ll always prefer the bowl I make for her myself. She’ll make it for her own children, and maybe for her grandchildren. “This is what my mother made for me when I was a little girl,” she’ll tell them. “Eat it up!” And as they sip they’ll wonder what kind of woman I was, what I must have been like, to make chicken no-no soup like this that was so tasty and fragrant. And that means that my scattered, no-tradition Southern California family will have created a culinary tradition as good as anyone’s Italian or Jewish grandma has made.

And really, that’s the way to pass down the love through the generations. If my great grand-kids can enjoy chicken No-No soup someday, well, that’s immortality for you.