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comforting to eat. This isn’t tribal sentiment; for all that it’s known as Jewish Penicillin, I wasn’t raised on it, but eating it makes me feel I should have been, that indeed we all should have been. (That scientists have recently found chicken broth to contain anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial properties is interesting for those on the lookout for non-patented flu remedies, but true believers – culinary as much as devotional – never needed any such corroboration.)
    What we ate at home, rather, was boiled chicken with rice, and I suppose for that reason I like rice in the soup, if it’s to have anything – though it truly is at its best as a pure, gold, soothing liquid. But actually it is traditional to sully its purity with starch: go for lokshen (vermicelli) or go native with kneidlach, which are best described as cracker-meal dumplings. I always used to think that in order to appreciate these you really needed to have been brought up on them. I wasn’t and remained resistant. But I’ve since found that they do not have to be the digestion-challenging cannonballs that tradition all but decrees. (Not, you understand, that stodge, in this context, is exactly bad.) Just make sure to whisk the egg well before adding the other ingredients and what you come up with are toothsome dumplings that are soothingly fluffy as well as comfortingly substantial. So I’m happy to give you my friend Olivia Lichtenstein’s recipe for them and urge you to get mixing and rolling. The fat used should be schmalz (chicken fat), which will be available at any kosher butcher’s; failing that – dietary laws considered – it should be goose fat or margarine. But at the risk of offending the laws of Leviticus – and forget risk, it’s a dead cert here – I use butter. But, you know, schmalz is not hard to make: just pluck out the gobbets of chicken fat that cluster just inside the cavity and melt them in a small pan over low heat. That should be more than enough to provide the two tablespoons required here.
    As for the chicken in your pot: it really has to be a boiler. A boiling chicken yields up flavour like nothing else, and its flesh needs long cooking, so it doesn’t go stringy after hours of boiling. If you can’t get hold of a boiling chicken, then you’ll have to use a roasting one, but don’t cook it for more than an hour and a half. You can then take the meat off the bones, put the carcass back in the stock and carry on cooking it, though you may still need to bump up the flavour; in which case, I’d recommend a glug or two of Benedicta’s Touch of Taste Concentrated Chicken Bouillon.
    For some reason, chicken soup seems to get hotter than any other liquid known to humankind: unless you’re careful, you’ll sear your throat before you soothe it. But soothe it you truly will: this is amazingly restorative stuff.
    Serves 4 (or 8 Gentiles).
    2 small or 1 large boiling chicken
    1 unpeeled onion, halved
    1 stick celery
    2 carrots, peeled and chunked
    a few stalks of parsley
    a few peppercorns
    2 bay leaves
    1 tablespoon salt
    Put all the ingredients in a large stockpot, cover abundantly with water, and bring to the boil. Skim to remove all the grey scum that will float to the surface, then let cook at a simmer for about 3 hours. Just keep tasting: when the broth tastes golden and chickeny, it’s ready. Remove the chicken and, if you like, leave the soup to get cold so you can remove any fat that collects on the surface. That way you accrue some schmalz, too.
    Reheat the stock, and serve it as a plain soup, or add a few carrot batons – from about 2 carrots, say – and cook in the soup, adding some torn up pieces of chicken to warm through at the end. I like to add freshly chopped parsley.
    KNEIDLACH
    As I said, schmalz you’ll have to get from a kosher butcher unless you can render or skim enough from the chicken above, but matzo meal is available at supermarkets (I prefer to use the medium rather than the fine