Green Minestrone With Chicken
Green Minestrone With Chicken
Adventures in Cooking My Cookbooks: Mimi Sheraton's The Whole World Loves Chicken Soup
One of my favorite Jewish customs is how, immediately after Yom Kippur ends, we are supposed to begin building our sukkah - the temporary, outdoor dwelling structures that Jewish people eat, celebrate, and sometimes sleep in during the weeklong holiday of Sukkot.
Yom Kippur is a day spent ensconced in the spiritual realm - fasting, atoning, praying, setting intentions. On Yom Kippur it is customary to wear white. We are supposed to avoid wearing leather, showering, applying makeup or perfume, having sex, and even drinking water. And then, the holiday ends and - as soon as you possibly can - Jewish tradition implores us to reenter everyday life in the most physical way imaginable: building something tangible with our own hands. (Though presumably after those first magical bites of bagels and lox!)
As someone who lives in an apartment with no access to personal green space, building a sukkah isn’t exactly in the cards for me and my family. So instead, I begin menu planning.
This year, we will spend the first two days of Sukkot with my husband’s family in Philadelphia, dining in their backyard sukkah. But several of our meals during the rest of the holiday will be eaten in our synagogue’s sukkah, which means toting casserole pans, covered Pyrex dishes, bottles of wine, and compostable plates two blocks over from our home in Brooklyn. (All hail the granny cart for its unbeatable schelp assist!)
I’ve got all kinds of braises and stews and hearty roasted vegetable dishes in mind for the week of Sukkot dinners. And I’m particularly excited about a soup I came across while scanning through Mimi Sheraton’s 1995 cookbook, The Whole World Loves Chicken Soup: Green Minestrone with Chicken and Pesto.
The recipe looked so tasty, it inspired the return of my semi-regular newsletter column: Adventures in Cooking My Cookbook Collection. (Here’s the first column, for readers who want the backstory.)
Mimi Sheraton - Food Writing Diva, Chicken Soup Maven
Mimi Sheraton is one of the country’s most celebrated food writers - right up there with Julia Child, James Beard, Clementine Paddleford, Edna Lewis, Marian Cunningham, Madhur Jaffrey, Claudia Roden, and Craig Claiborne as a pioneer of the contemporary genre of food criticism and cookbook writing. She is the author of many cookbooks (including the celebrated The German Cookbook, published in 1965), and spent nearly a decade as the restaurant critic for The New York Times.
Born in 1926 in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, she grew up in a Jewish household with food-loving parents. Her father was in the wholesale fruit and vegetable business, and her mother was a celebrated home cook. And while her family was not particularly religious, Sheraton told me,
“On Friday afternoon, we would always smell something cooking as we came home from school—either gefilte fish and chicken soup, or pot roast and mushroom barley soup. My mother would light the candles, though I don’t think she ever said a blessing. And we did not make a real motzi [blessing] over the bread, but we always had challah. When my grandmother was alive, she baked challah every week and gave a loaf to all of her children living in New York.”
Like many Brooklyn-born Jews of her era, she fled to “the city” shortly after graduating high school. She’s lived in Greenwich Village since 1945, and in the same home since 1965. But her mother’s Friday night table clearly left an impression because in 1995, she wrote The Whole World Loves Chicken Soup, a cookbook dedicated to the ubiquity of chicken-based soups across the world.
The cookbook is a joy to read, and not only for its globe-spanning recipes (think: Armenian Lemon Chicken Soup, Ghanaian Chicken and Eggplant Soup, and China’s Steamed Chicken Custard Soup). She peppers the recipes with related lore and literature, including this gem from an old Louisiana nursery rhyme:
The rooster and the chicken had a fight / The chicken knocked the rooster out of sight / The rooster told the chicken, ‘That’s alright, / I’ll meet you in the gumbo tomorrow night.’
There is, of course, a recipe for Jewish-style chicken soup (plus matzo balls and kreplach), which Sheraton defines as her “Mother of all Chicken Soups.” She includes a discussion about chicken soup’s mythical reputation as “Jewish penicillin,” and writes about the “Ashkenazic obsession” with our favorite golden broth.
But the recipe that most caught my eye was the Green Minestrone with Chicken and Pesto (minestrone verde al pesto), a Ligurian chicken broth filled with leeks, green beans, cabbage, and zucchini, and topped with basil-scented swirls of pesto. With all of those green vegetables, the soup could easily be served in the early spring. But I think it makes a perfect fit for the Jewish calendar’s fall harvest holiday.
While it is not a Jewish recipe, per se, the base recipe is very familiar to the Jewish chicken soup I (and Sheraton) grew up eating: chicken and aromatics long-simmered until the broth glistens and shines. Everything else is delicious commentary.
Chicken Soup, But Make it Italian
Most wonderfully - and unfortunately not something I take for granted with all cookbooks - the recipes I’ve made from The Whole World Loves Chicken Soup actually work. That goes, too, for Sheraton’s Green Minestrone, though I streamlined her method a bit, and made some minor adjustments. For example, Sheraton says to include all of the chicken’s giblets, except the liver - but most of the chickens available today do not include them. So I left them out, and did not miss a thing.
Sheraton’s original recipe also includes two optional ingredients: split peas (2/3 cup dried, cooked and then stirred into to the broth) and chopped Swiss chard (1 small bunch, coarsely chopped). I opted not to add either. I love Swiss chard, but thought its earthy flavor might be overpowering in an otherwise delicate soup. Similarly, I love the clear, golden essence of chicken broth too much to muddy it up with split peas. If I were to add anything similar, I would choose cooked and drained white beans to play up the soup’s minestrone vibes.
This minestrone can be served as is, with challah or crusty Italian bread along side for dipping. And/or you could layer cooked rice, potatoes, or egg noodles into serving bowls before spooning the soup overtop. And as for the pesto, it adds a lovely extra layer of verdant, Italian-inspired flavor, but you absolutely don’t need it. The minestrone, which is brimming with texture from the vegetables, is spectacular all on its own.
Sukkot begins this Sunday night, so finish hammering in those first nails into your sukkah and get those soup pots fired up!
For my vegetarian readers, Sheraton’s Green Minestrone with Chicken would be hard to modify, since a lot of the flavor comes from the broth itself. But I definitely don’t want to leave you hanging for Sukkot, so here is one of my favorite autumnal soups that hits a similar vibe, and would warm up any al fresco sukkah dinner: Cozy Cabbage and Farro Soup.
Cook, eat, and share them in good health!
Green Minestrone With Chicken
This recipe is adapted from The Whole World Loves Chicken Soup, by Mimi Sheraton (1995). I also modified the recipe’s name from it’s original Green Minestrone with Chicken and Pesto, because I think the soup is equally good with and without the extra herbaceous drizzle.
Serves 6 to 8
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