Grandma's Soup Chicken
That “Thursday, chicken day” custom that Diner and Cooper describe is resoundingly familiar to my family, as it was almost definitely the case throughout my dad’s childhood. My dad – the same one who makes his own tortillas from scratch and repurposes leftovers into new dishes – grew up eating the same thing week after week: chicken soup and its consequent soup chicken. My dad usually recalls soup chicken with a laugh and head shake; he knows real cooking now and can’t imagine eating same thing over and over – no spice, no novelty! – today. But his love of food and fascination with flavor is culinary rebellion in response to doing just that. He and his sisters grew up in a kosher home, complete with Shabbos soup and a clean-your-plate mentality modeled by my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor.
Much of the literature about Holocaust survivors and their families focuses on generational trauma, both epigenetic and socially transmitted. I have no doubt that our family has been fundamentally shaped by the horrors my grandfather suffered and know that trauma often emerges in subtle, insidious ways. And sometimes, that insidiousness crept onto the plate. Research has demonstrated that survivors of the Holocaust held five common food attitudes: difficulty throwing food away, even when spoiled; storing excess food; craving certain foods; difficulty standing in line for food; and experiencing anxiety when food is not readily available (Science Direct Article citation). I remember my grandfather becoming inpatient while waiting for food, encouraging us all to finish our dinners, stealing bites from neighboring plates – all behaviors that likely stem from his childhood food insecurity in concentration camps.
My grandmother was not a Holocaust survivor. Her family history, exhaustively traced by a distant cousin was a professional genealogist who served as the Director for the International Association of Jewish Genealogists, reveals paternal Ukrainian and maternal Romanian roots; her great-grandparents migrated to the United States in the early twentieth century. Her family lived through the new shtetls of America; her foodways was cultivated stateside. But my grandmother adopted my grandfather’s food attitudes and adapted them in the kitchen. She’s the one who served Shabbos meals each week and the one who made sure the soup chicken didn’t go to waste.
I remember my grandma’s chicken soup only vaguely from second night of Passover seders and the occasional Shabbat sleepover. I can’t remember if it contained matzah balls or noodles or carrots or celery. But I can picture dots of oil on the surface of the broth, served in cream bowls alongside flowered glass plateware and chartreuse Pyrex with cream floral print. I can hear my grandfather’s sometimes unintelligible singing in Yiddish. It’s only been about five years since I’ve been to their house, but my memories of that space – a dark wood cabinet with seder plates and kiddush cups, a chest of drawers filled with handkerchiefs and yarmulkes, rattan dining chairs, a pastel woven couch that might best be described “1997 resort chic,” sepia-stained photos of my dad and his sisters, school pictures of my cousins, button-up short-sleeve shirts well-worn to the point of threadbare, blue eyeshadow and hot pink lipstick – are all recollections built around those customary, soup-featuring meals. Those olfactory and gustatory memories are what I know of my grandparents; my grandfather passed away while I was in college and my grandmother, while alive, is bedridden with dementia.
While my dad frequently bakes mandelbrot just as my grandmother did (“they’re the best frozen!”), he makes chicken soup his own. It’s still comfort food – there’s usually pints in the freezer at my parents’ house, and I think he once made a batch in my brother’s college dorm kitchen when he was sick – but it’s not served with the same trauma he ate growing up. The boiled-whole soup chicken isn’t just put on a plate in my house – it’s made into enchiladas and Waldorf salad, repurposed and recreated, Americanized and globalized. Chicken soup still tells a deeply Jewish story, but my dad skims off some trauma and tradition alongside the schmaltz.