Three ways with chicken soup

These recipes turn up the flavor for a chilly February

Cooking well is all about recognizing patterns. There are common denominators in all recipes that don’t really change, and that’s when cooking gets deeper, more exciting. Recognizing what can (and cannot) change in a recipe means that everything else can be finagled to your liking.

For example, understand how to prep and roast a whole fish and you can roast tiny fish or big fish, round fish or flat fish. Learn to make softly whipped cream from scratch and you can make whiskeyspiked cream and gingerscented cream and whipped cream laced with whirls of seasonal jam. Make a pot of clams; you can now make a pot of mussels or steam a pair of lobsters, because you have the gist of the technique at play. This was one of the main lessons I internalized years earlier cooking on the line in restaurants, food magazine test kitchens, private homes and, once, on a makeshift grill built into the ground of an Italian pigandsheep farm.

Three, my lucky number, is how many recipes I try to group together under a single process. An example I love is a method I call “Necessary Chicken Soup.” Here, three variations of one core soup recipe share the same essential quantities and techniques, despite origins from three different backgrounds. There’s my Ashkenazi Jewish grandma’s cureall, freshherb matzo ball soup; a take on Colombian ajiaco, a silky, hearty soup with potatoes and corn; and a rougehued chicken and escarole soup from a friend’s Genovese relatives.

The approach, in short, is to put chicken, vegetables and aromatics in a large pot and add cold water to cover by half an inch. Bring it all to a boil over high heat, lower to a simmer and cook for 50 minutes. Remove the chicken, use two forks to shred the meat from the bone, and return to the soup. Add a final punch of flavor at the end to brighten the soup after its steady simmer. Serve with toppings or don’t.

Make any of these three recipes and you’ll get the hang of the approach and the overall flow of the method: chicken soup for any whim or craving.

Julia Clancy Chicken soup with fresh herbs is a welcoming base for warming soups from Italy, Colombia and the author’s Jewish grandmother.