generational shift

[adrian_turtle]

Last year, I bought something called a "soup sock," that isn't as silly as it sounds. It's a cheesecloth bag, big enough to hold an entire chicken. If you want to make chicken soup and strain it through cheesecloth for a clear broth, you don't need to pour the pot of soup through a strainer. You can just put the chicken in the cheesecloth bag before cooking it.

They include a recipe in the package, because of course they do. I've kept the recipe card because it IS silly, especially for something called "Mama's Old Fashioned Chicken Soup." It contains a whole chicken, 2 onions, and 2 tablespoons of fresh cracked pepper. So far, so good. It also contains 3 cups of diced celery, and 2 packets of sugar substitute.

It shouldn't feel so very peculiar that "Mama's Old-Fashioned" could refer to a Boomer or Gen-X woman who relies on artificial sweeteners (because she doesn't have a teaspoon of sugar in the house? Because she can't imagine using a half a cup less of celery?) But on the other paw, I know my grandmothers used saccharine tablets everywhere it was appropriate and some places it wasn't, and my mother preferred aspartame. I have cousins-in-law who are already mothers of college students, and they cooked with sucralose for decades, though generally the kind that can replace sugar cup-for-cup.

Comments

[kate_schaefer]

Huh. I've made chicken soup for close to fifty years now, and I have never, ever put any sweetener into the broth. I've never used a whole chicken, either; that's the job of chicken carcasses, saved in the freezer until it's broth-making time. I can see that a soup sock would work just as well for a carcass or two as for a whole chicken.

That is a lot of celery.

[adrian_turtle]

I've never sweetened chicken soup either. (I will sometimes even use a little vinegar, though that's partly for health.) If I want sweetness in a soup, I'll add onion or carrot. But cooked celery is so bitter! My sense is that the sweetener is just to alleviate the bitterness of the celery. Back when I did dairy, my concept of cream of celery soup involved about as much onion and leek as celery.

[kareina]

Perhaps that bag could be useful for applesauce or jam with apple in it, just toss in the apple chunks without peeling and after cooking press everything but the peels out of the bag?

I would so not try their "old fashioned" soup--they lost me on both the celery and the artificial sweetener, neither of which I use in my cooking. But then I don't think sugar belongs in a soup, either.

[adrian_turtle]

I agree that it could be useful for applesauce. It would probably be good enough for cooking the grapes if I ever get enough for a grape pie.

I don't think sugar belongs in this kind of soup, but I believe it sometimes belongs in other kinds. When my father made tomato soup from the tomatoes in our garden, he added a spoonful of sugar some years and a slug of cider vinegar other years. It depended how sweet the tomatoes were. And there's cabbage soup.

My parents both liked cabbage soup very much, but they disagreed about it so strongly we never had it when I was growing up. My mother's family made a cabbage soup that was very, very, sour. (I think it may have included both vinegar and sauerkraut, as well as cabbage. But I never tasted it.) You had to add sugar at the table, like you add sugar to tea. My father's family's cabbage soup was sweet-and-sour. Again, I never tasted it. I know it had raisins and onion, and I would not be a bit surprised if it had sugar as well.

[kareina]

Having never learned to like vinegar (or wine for that matter), in any form, I never learned the appeal of sweet and sour soups. But I understand how your parents could both feel strongly enough about the one right way to do a certain soup that it was easier to just never make it.

[pameladean]

I think the soup sock is rather clever.

I don't find celery bitter, but that much of it would just be monotonous. I'd replace a third of it with carrot and another third with potatoes. I don't think chicken soup generally has potatoes, but my family are potato fanatics.

P.

[adrian_turtle]

Chicken soup with noodles or matzo balls are perfectly standard so why not potatoes? They sell gluten-free egg noodles made of potato starch, which are pretty terrible. Cubes of potato are a LOT better. Cubes of eggplant might even be better, and I don't like eggplant.

I know people who don't eat anything made with matzo meal during Passover, and they customarily put potatoes in their chicken soup. Why on earth not use matzo meal during Passover? Because the word we translate as "leaven" is not, technically, the same as yeast leavening. It's more like "what happens when you let wet flour sit around for more than 20 minutes before baking it." And there's flour in the matzo meal, so you shouldn't get it wet and let it sit around for more than 20 minutes. This spring, a local geek fed matzo meal to a sourdough starter. And the sourdough starter ate it, and went on to make perfectly good bread. I know 3 people who recoiled in horror and decided to stop eating matzo ball soup during Passover.

[pameladean]

The only good gluten free noodles I've had were standard rice noodles, and those might be weird in chicken soup. Potato certainly works better than that would, it's just not very noodly.

The rest is frankly above my pay grade! P

[evalerie]

Aw, good matzo balls are one of the treasures of Passover!

Speaking as a person with celiac, if I was putting gluten-free noodles into soup, I'd try Rice Ramen brand, because those are intended to be served in soup. They're available with or without the soup packet, as just plain noodles.

My pick for gluten-free pasta is that I bought an electronic pasta machine and make my own. You put in your choice of flour -- gluten-free in my case -- plus water and maybe egg, and in about ten minutes you have pasta that is freshly made and amazing! There's a whole rabbit hole of online communities about home pasta machines, and there is a store in Italy that sells additional dies that can be used to make pasta in different shapes. I am not sure how well homemade pasta would stand up to sitting in soup, but I think it would do reasonably well.

[evalerie]

I too usually don't find celery bitter, though when I grow homegrown celery I've gotten a much wider variety of tastes, and some years it is a little bitter, while in most years it is very far from bitter. Though even in those years the leaves are often very strongly bitter.

Are you the Pamela Dean who wrote the book Tam Lin -- one of my all-time favorite books? Just curious! If it is yours, thank you very much for writing it!!

[pameladean]

Yes, I am! Your very welcome. I'm glad you liked it.

P.

[lcohen]

i was going to say what kate said both about not using sweetener and not using the whole chicken, only the carcass. not being a much of a fan of celery, i would never use that much celery and yes, please, to onions and carrots. back when i could cook, i would just have a gallon zip lock bag in my freezer and stick whatever odds and ends i had after chopping veggies or herbs, and then i'd use those for stock, so it never turned out the same way twice.