Introduction
Whether full or lean, however, those platters probably contained chicken soup, an emblematic food in Jewish culture. Historically speaking, chicken soup predates Judaism; archeological evidence found in China suggests that domesticated chickens may have been boiled and served well before 6,000 BCE (Hata et al 2021, Zielenski 2013). But chicken soup has gained ubiquity in the Jewish community. Maimonides, a renown 12th century philosopher and physician, attested to its healing power, with “Jewish penicillin” still considered a folk remedy today (Nathan 2019). References to chicken soup appear in 1950s advertising cookbooks and today’s blogs alike. Pictured above is an image from the cover of The 100 Most Jewish Foods – a visual representation of its cultural importance.
Chicken soup is made nostalgic in Yiddish poetry and made regretful in writings about the stereotypical Jewish mother - “the all-engulfing nurturer who devours the very soul with every spoonful of hot chicken soup she gives” (Duncan 1983). But existing scholarship about Jewish-American foodways makes no inquiry into chicken soup, rather treating it as a given – a kind of cultural common knowledge gained through generations of not writing down recipes and eating the same thing weekly. For example, Deutsch and Saks write about the ubiquity of Jewish-American “chicken in the pot” – whole chicken simmered into a soup, with the chicken then combined with vegetables to a main course (2008) – without interrogating why. For them, and for Jewish-Americans in general, chicken soup is a staple – but as a staple, it carries deeper meaning and demonstrates change over time. In the series of essays and primary document interpretations on this website, I’ll discuss how chicken soup serves as a link between Old World and New World Jewish foods, a symbolic representation of mothering and caretaking, and an example of how ethnic foods can be commercialized, all together telling a culinary story of Jewish-American assimilation and “becoming white” over the 20th century.