Chicken soup for the weary soul
Resolve to reconnect with the joy in cooking during the new year
The very first time I boiled a whole chicken, nearly 10 years ago, I was overwhelmed by how much it perfumed my apartment with the scent of my mother’s kitchen. I wasn’t trying to re-create her samgyetang, but I did, by accident.
Fortified with ginseng and jujubes, this Korean chicken soup is a garlic lover’s dream. I remember how the sound of the cloves, plunked into the pot, echoed the syllables of the dish’s name: Sam. Gye. Tang.
But it was the smell of my golden broth that transported me. When I inhaled its aroma, the past ran through me like an electric current, and I burst into tears. Sick with nostalgia (and a gnarly cold), I found myself suddenly in two places at once: my kitchenette in New York City and Atlanta, where I was born and raised in a brick house with a peach tree in the front yard.
There are many definitions of the sensation that overtook my body that day, but perhaps the most famous is what French novelist Marcel Proust called involuntary memory — what we now sometimes call “Proustian memory.” It is a reference to one particular scene in his seven-volume novel “In Search of Lost Time,” in which the narrator is suddenly seized by childhood memories after taking a bite of a tea-soaked lemon madeleine.
“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me,” Proust writes. “Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?”
When those unbidden memories happen in my life, I try to linger in the feeling.
What excites me in the kitchen, and what provides the most joy, is when I accidentally tap into something old, an involuntary memory, something I had forgotten in the depths of my mind, such as the simple smell of a chicken boiling in water.
That’s the kind of cooking I’d like to do more of in the new year. If I resolve to find those small moments of “all-powerful joy” in the kitchen and out, at my desk and in life, maybe they’ll be more likely to reveal themselves to me. Maybe I’ll taste more Proustian madeleines, and maybe I’ll cry more. (Crying has many health benefits, after all.)
Luckily, there are many places to find good madeleines dipped in tea, metaphorically speaking. And when you’re most in need of warmth and succor, chicken soup is never a bad place to start.
It’s never lost on me what a privilege it is to get to cook for a living. But there are days when I languish in the kitchen, utterly sick of cooking. (It’s the cleaning that destroys me most.) And especially this past year, when it seemed that the world was falling apart again, I found it difficult at times to find joy in any of it.
Comfort cooking can be hard to come by if you have to do it.
My last-meal-on-earth cooking is roasting chicken. I love preparing
a small bird for myself on the weekend, because that’s when I have all the time in the world. In this case, the process provides the joy. I can salt and sugar the chicken on Saturday, leaving it to dry-brine in the fridge overnight; on Sunday, my dinner is ready for the oven.
The eating is long, too: Roast chicken has many stages of life — I can cook it once and have it for days. Because as much as I love cooking, I love eating more.
First, it’s dinner, often the gorgeous chicken breast, absolutely juicy, with crispy skin. Better yet, if you’re like my mother and me, your favorite parts of the chicken are a secret: the two “oysters” underneath the bird, tucked behind the thighs, tender and slicked with schmaltz. One for each of us.
After this first meal, I like to maul the rest of the meat off the bones to fashion into all manner of repasts throughout the week. Then — and this may be my favorite part — I turn the carcass into stock with whatever bits and bobs I have left over in the pantry: bay leaves, black peppercorns, an onion with its peel still on (which my mother taught me lends both color and flavor to soups and stews).
The Instant Pot makes quick work of this. In just an hour, it will pressure-cook my past, present and future into a golden stock that I can drink in the mornings before my coffee.
Roast chicken may be my therapy, but chicken soup is my panacea, my madeleine dipped in tea.