An Exaltation of Soups (51 page)
Read An Exaltation of Soups Online
Authors: Patricia Solley
T
HE
O
LD
M
AN
W
HO
E
NTERED THE
R
OOM
A Jewish woman in a North African
mellah
[Jewish section of the city] was badly scalded by boiling soup and was dying. Her doctors and her family left the room to discuss the situation. Then she heard a noise and opened her eyes. An old man had entered the room. He put his hand on her and said, “Get up.” Then he left. She got up without pain and joined her family in the other room. They could not believe their eyes. When she told them what had happened, they knew she had seen the Prophet Elijah, may his memory be a blessing.
—A
DAPTED FROM
P
INHAS
S
ADEH’S
J
EWISH
F
OLKTALES
, 1989
Serves 6 to 8
T
HIS IS SUCH
a pretty soup, all earth tones with chunks of bright pumpkin or winter squash jostling each other, sprinkled generously with parsley. And how about the aroma and taste? Exotically fragrant and sweetly spicy. Serve in thick pottery bowls, if you have them—Morocco is famous for its ceramics. In the souks of Fez you can see men spinning their potter wheels at all times.
10 cups (2½ quarts) Chicken Stock
1¼ cups dried yellow split peas
1 large onion, chopped
¼ cup olive oil
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground ginger
¼ teaspoon saffron threads, heated and crumbled
6 cups peeled, seeded, and cubed pumpkin (from a 3- to 4-pound pumpkin; you can substitute butternut or another winter squash)
Salt and pepper to taste
Minced fresh parsley, for garnish
O
P
REPARE
Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.
O
C
OOK
1. Bring the stock, split peas, and onion to a boil in a large soup pot over high heat. Reduce the heat to low and simmer, partially covered, for 30 to 40 minutes.
2. Stir in the oil, cinnamon, ginger, saffron, and pumpkin. Bring to a boil again over high heat,
then reduce it to low and simmer, partially covered, for about 1 hour, stirring occasionally. The pumpkin will be beginning to fall apart and the peas will be tender.
3. Season with salt and pepper.
O
S
ERVE
Ladle the soup into bowls and garnish each portion with generous amounts of parsley.
P
UMPKIN IN
M
OROCCO
Once, during my sojourn in Morocco, it was getting close to Halloween and suddenly every American in Casablanca wanted perfect pumpkins to carve into jack o’lanterns. My friend Sandy resolutely set off to her favorite and reliably cheapest
marché
, putting up with its limited selection in the interest of bargains. She went to the first dealer, with his produce in boxes on the ground.
“Un potiron, s’il vous plait,”
she said. A pumpkin, please. When he showed her a dish of pumpkin pieces, she shook her head.
“Non, pas pour le tagine. Je veux un grand potiron, complet.”
No, not to make stew. I want a whole big pumpkin, uncut. His eyes widened.
“Un moment, madame.”
After a whispered conference with his son, the boy dashed off and returned shortly with a whole pumpkin and a lot of interested onlookers.
“C’est parfait,”
said Sandy.
“Combien?”
Perfect. How much? He quoted her a price so high, she just stared at him in disbelief before stalking to another dealer. And thus began a grim march around the market, soliciting a whole pumpkin, having to wait while each merchant sent away for one that wasn’t cut, then unsuccessfully trying to bargain down the price. All at once, she told me later, laughing at her herself, she realized that there was only one whole pumpkin in the entire market, and it was following her from merchant to merchant—the same one!—with the crowd of interested onlookers growing ever larger and more hilarious. “Well, did you buy it in the end?” I asked. “Heavens no,” she said, “too expensive!”
OM
K
IPPUR
The sunset-to-sunset day of Yom Kippur itself is a fast, but chicken is traditionally the number one item on the menu before and after because of an ancient ritual called
kapparoth.
Imagine this: for every woman in your family you take a chicken, and for every man you take a rooster, and on the eve of Yom Kippur you whirl the birds over each family member’s head, saying “May this sacrificed bird serve as a substitute for [Sarah, or Zaki, or whomever],” then quickly have its throat slit and prepare it for eating. Depending on your family size, you can end up with a lot of chickens this way, and chicken soup is definitely on the menu. Egyptians and Lebanese eat a lemony egg soup,
Beid ab lamouna
, right before the fast; Greeks eat the same
soup—Avgolemono
—to break the fast. And don’t forget chicken soup with
kreplach
, where the dough covers the filling as we all hope kindness will cover our sins on this Day of Atonement.
“A Y
OM
K
IPPUR
S
CANDAL
”
In this charming story of a Ukrainian shtetl, 1,800 rubles are stolen from the synagogue of Kasrilevka during the Yom Kippur service. What a scandal! Rabbi Yozifel locks everyone in and orders a thorough search, beginning with his own pockets. When he comes to Lazer Yossel—a “jewel of a young man,” the smartest and most admired young man in town—Yossel turns white and refuses. Tension mounts. Has he stolen the money? Hands are laid on him; he’s turned upside down; his pockets are turned inside out. What’s shaken out? “A couple of well-gnawed chicken bones and a few dozen plum pits still moist from chewing. You can imagine what an impression this made—to discover food in the pockets of our prodigy on this holiest of fast days.” The 1,800 rubles are never found, but no one cares—it’s this scandal that will live to the end of Lazer Yossel’s days.
—S
HOLEM
A
LEICHEM
,
nineteenth-century Yiddish writer
EBANON
LEMONY EGG SOUP WITH CHICKEN
BEID AB LAMOUNA
Serves 6 to 8
T
HIS MARVELOUS, COMPLEX
soup is quite different from its pure Greek cousin,
Avgolemono.
This version is provocatively lemon, chunky with chicken, redolent with herbs, and lapped in a milky white, savory broth. Good enough to eat, one bowl after another after another.
8 cups (2 quarts) Chicken Stock
1 raw chicken breast, boned, skinned, and halved
Zest of 1 lemon, grated
⅔ cup long-grain rice
¼ cup lemon juice
3 raw egg yolks
1 tablespoon chopped fresh mint, or 1 teaspoon dried
1 teaspoon dried oregano, rubbed into the soup between your palms
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
1 teaspoon grated black pepper
Salt to taste
O
P
REPARE
Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.
O
C
OOK
1. Bring the stock to a boil in a large soup pot over high heat, then reduce it to low and add the chicken breast and half the lemon zest. Cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Remove the chicken, let cool, then cut into small bite-size pieces and set aside.
2. Bring the stock to a boil again, add the rice, and reduce the heat to a simmer. Cook, covered, for 20 minutes. Add the cooked chicken to the soup and let simmer while preparing the sauce.
3. In a small bowl, whisk the lemon juice, remaining zest, and the egg yolks. Lighten the mixture with ½ cup hot stock, then stir the sauce into the simmering soup until it clouds and thickens a bit. Do not let the soup boil, or it will curdle.
O
S
ERVE
Stir in the mint, oregano, parsley, and pepper. Season with salt, then ladle the soup into bowls and serve immediately.
L
USCIOUS
L
EMONS
Lemons likely began life as a “citron” some 8,000 years ago in India or in the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq. Ancient Mesopotamians raised them for their beauty and aroma—they were large, 4 to 8 inches across, and flowered throughout the year. Egyptians loved them for their aid in embalming. Jews brought them to Israel from their captivity in Babylon some 2,500 years ago. Romans used them as mothballs until Persian slaves taught them to put them to better use in their kitchens. At various places and times, citrus fruits have been identified as aphrodisiacs, as cures for fever and colic, and as protection against poisons. Europeans in the Dark Ages, however, were sure that lemons were poisonous themselves—even when crusaders brought them back from Palestine with rave reviews.
The original variety—the fragrant citron
Citrus medica
Linn—is one of the Four Species used in the synagogue service on the Feast of Tabernacles. In ancient times, it was a popular Jewish symbol on coins, graves, and synagogues—called
etrog
, a word of Indian origin—and was used ritually, especially as a handle for the circumcision knife. It was so popular, in fact, that it was proposed as a standard of measure. And when, following the Jewish rebellion against Rome in
A.D
. 66, Jews were dispersed throughout the Roman Empire, they took their citron with them, planting trees across the Mediterranean in Spain, Italy, Sicily, Tunisia, Algeria, and Turkey. Its scarcity in northern Europe during the Middle Ages caused much anguish for the many Jews who had migrated there.
This “gathering in” or “season of joy” festival comes on the heels of Yom Kippur, and it celebrates for eight days the end of the judgment period, the bounty of the harvest, and new beginnings—all at once. The traditional celebration takes place in a
sukkah.
What is a
sukkah?
In Leviticus 23:42, the Lord says that after the harvest, “you shall dwell in booths for seven days … that your generations may know that I made the people of Israel dwell in booths [in the wilderness] when I brought them out of the land of Egypt.” Thus small temporary booths are built outside, with fronds, light planks, or tree boughs; people sit in them and welcome friends; lots of eating goes on—it’s a lovely festival. The focus is on fruit and vegetables, thus the lovely fruit soups like the Polish spiced plum soup on the next page, but the Ashkenazis still favor chicken soup with dumplings for this holiday, and many Sephardis favor fresh fava bean soup or spicy lentil stews.
M
ARC
C
HAGALL’S
F
EAST OF THE
T
ABERNACLES
Two men sit at a table in a traditional
sukkah
, one eating soup with a big spoon, while a woman passes more food through a window in the side of the
sukkah;
a boy plays on the ground with a chicken; and another man carries the four species (the citron etrog, palm shoot, myrtle, and willow branches) to the synagogue. It’s a gorgeous goache painting, painted in 1916 and originally commissioned as a mural for a secondary school outside St. Petersburg, then called Petrograd. Chagall was born in Vitebsk in 1887; he studied art in St. Petersburg and Paris in his twenties, then returned for a visit home to Vitebsk in 1914 and got stuck there when World War I broke loose. So he just settled right in, married his childhood sweetheart, became director of the local academy of arts, and began painting these gorgeous village paintings. His daughter, Ida, was born just as he was painting
Feast of the Tabernacles.