Macabre, isn't it?
Previous chicken bones and stuff that comes inside a whole chicken.
Boiled under pressure for 1.5 hours
Strained twice, into a new pot and back into the pressure pot.
The real recipe will have celery and carrots such a French mirepoix, cubed potato and peas.
This has corn and peas and cubed potato.
Poor people sure ate well.
I had this growing up and I could have lived on it. It's actually chicken noodle soup. The egg noodles are made to be thick and dense. Sometimes they overlap and stick together for double thickness and those are the things I loved the best.
Then I moved from home and this slipped to memory.
Then, on a visit to Omaha my sister said she was making chicken pot pie. I visualized a commercial style chicken a la king inside a pie shell. Another favorite thing. And I always felt gypped when the frozen version had only the top pastry shell. But my sister came out with this. True to my mother's recipe.
I think the pressure pot version is improvement because it wrests the very last molecule of goodness from the bone marrow.
But the battery chickens of today are worse than the farm chicken of yesteryear. So now you must buy a free-range chicken or an upscale organic version. Just a few weeks older, and just a little more varied diet makes all the difference in the world. And you can really see that in the chicken broth that is made from the carcass. The fast battery young depressing battery chickens make weak broth that divides into thin layers of aspic and fat when chilled. The slightly older chicken with more varied diets produce broth that is entirely aspic with a thin layer of fat, and the taste is deep and rich and magnificent.
If you're lucky enough to get a genuine free range chicken you'll probably find it a bit gamey. They taste very much like pheasant. And the broth from those bones is incredible. And that's how all chickens used to be.
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