The Kitchen Counter Cooking School

My mother always said that if you can boil water, you can make soup. Chef Thierry had remarked that it’s a gift for leftovers. From the beginning, I planned a class on stocks and soups as the last class, knowing that we’d end with a fridge full of leftovers.

As the volunteers filed in to claim a diaper and an apron, they all fretted about the night being the last. “It’s going to be so strange not to see everyone each week,” Gen said. I asked what people had been up to in their kitchens.

“You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the nutritionist said,” Dri said. “It’s funny, we hear so much about how fats are bad, but then she talked about the difference between good fats and bad fats, and how olive and coconut oil are good, but, then, palm oil isn’t so good. So I went through everything in my cupboards and I looked at all of the labels.” She considered the impact of feeding bad fats not only to herself but to her nieces and nephews who visit regularly. She was surprised by what she found in her wares, already edited significantly as part of her recent move. “Really, after the Alfredo versus Alfredo night, I just kind of decided to ditch most of that stuff anyway. I’ve just decided that I simply will not eat out of a box anymore.”

The comment spurred a lot of conversation. “I never thought I’d be like that but I’m getting there,” Jodi said. “I went to make pancakes the other day and I looked at the label. It was basically just flour, hydrogenated oil, corn syrup, and baking soda. I thought, Do I really want to feed this stuff to my son? I looked up a pancake recipe in a cookbook and thought, That’s it?” She had whipped up the batter and then mashed in an overripe banana. Her face took on an obvious look of pride when she reported that her son loved them. “He was like, ‘Mommy, these are the greatest pancakes!’ ”

Cheryl was baby-free again this week. Of all the classes, she confessed that this was a big one for her. When we visited her kitchen, she had made a can of soup for lunch. “I buy a ton of soup,” she admitted. The organic kinds can be expensive and often still come packed with salt. “I want to master soup so that I can cut down on how much I buy. After all these cooking classes, it feels a little lame to be opening a can.”

Few nutriments date back as far as soup, which likely debuted shortly after cavemen discovered the joys of boiling water. The word soup stems from the same Germanic word that led to the English word for “supper,” writes Alan Davidson in The Penguin Guide to Food. “From that came a noun, suppa, which passed into the Old French as soupe. This meant ‘piece of bread soaked in liquid’ . . . which ultimately led to the word ‘sop.’ ” So the words for supper, soup, and sopping up the soup with bread all derived from the same source.

By the late 1600s, soup was so beloved, people didn’t want to leave home without it, resulting in the development of “portable soup,” which was meat stock boiled so long it reduced to a thick paste that was dried and cut into strips. The strips were then reconstituted with hot water. Davidson quotes a portable soup enthusiast from 1736 who referred to it as “veal glue.” Mind you, those were words used by someone who liked it. The term restaurant stems from the French verb for “to restore,” a reference to the shops that sold soup in the late nineteenth century. To complete the cycle in something of an ironic twist, modern restaurants make “soup du jour” from leftovers of their nonsoup menus items. I knew that Lisa had a story about the trauma of soup du jour and asked her share it.

“My very first job cooking, I spent a year making soup,” Lisa started. She reported to work on the lunch shift with a chef who had worked in the industry for nearly forty years. She was impressed by his seemingly laissez-faire attitude toward soup du jour. Broccoli looked a little shaky? He’d whip up cream of broccoli soup. Too much cabbage? He’d ask Lisa to shred it and then add some ham, white beans, and carrots. The owners fired the chef without warning a few days after she started. In her first week out of culinary school, she found herself managing a lunch shift for a sixty-four-seat restaurant all by herself.

“It felt like being thrown out of a plane with a scribbled five-point list on how to complete a parachute jump,” Lisa said. In addition to a hundred other tasks that she had to complete the morning she first worked alone, she had to come up with the soup du jour. In the walk-in, she found a Thai curry base used for a seafood dish. She thinned it with chicken stock. A revelation! Sauce is thick soup!

Although she got a handle on the rest of the job after she figured out that there would be no replacement for the axed chef, she fretted about the soup. It kept her awake at night. “The very nature of it, that it can be anything, just freaked me out,” she told the group. You could feel her tension in the room. Lisa studied culinary school textbooks and looked up recipes trying to combat her soup angst. “But then I would get to the kitchen and find that I didn’t have all the ingredients, so I’d panic.”

Then a friend gave her The Daily Soup Cookbook by Leslie Kaul and Bob Spiegel. This simple book offers straightforward instructions on two hundred soup recipes organized by ingredient or theme, such as tomatoes, beans, or gumbo. She showed off her battered copy to the class.

“I would pile up my dying ingredients on a counter, and then flip through this book to find recipes that would fit. I could make something like minestrone or a tortilla lime soup, but not exactly. I would have hamburger and not sausage, or sausage but not chicken.” At first, this struck her as the culinary equivalent of forcing a square set of ingredients into a round hole. But she discovered that no matter what she changed, as long as the flavors seemed to go together, the soup always turned out anyway.

The soup du jour changed her perspective as a cook. “All those substitutions taught me that I do not have to be a slave to a recipe, or even to convention,” she said. “It also taught me something critical. You don’t have to buy ingredients for soup.”

With that, we all ransacked the fridge, pulling out vegetables and the remnants of a chicken I’d roasted the day before. “Soups generally follow the same formula,” I began. “You sauté some aromatics, usually chopped garlic or leeks, and then you add in vegetables, meat, or poultry that needs some time to cook. Add in stock or water. That’s a good time to add a bit of salt, some herbs and spices. Simmer for at least an hour. Give your soup some time to develop.” Foods that don’t take much time to cook, such as shellfish or pasta, go in at the end. “Then taste it. Add salt or whatever it might need to pep up the flavor. That could be lemon, vinegar, maybe minced garlic or fresh herbs.” Garnishes such as croutons or grated cheese are great but unnecessary.

We started two pots, then split up the volunteers into teams and let them figure out a soup from the leftovers. One team settled on chicken noodle soup, the other on a variation of minestrone. Each built an initial layer of flavor by sautéing onions and leeks. Team Chicken added carrots, celery, fresh corn, and a fistful of fresh thyme and parsley tied together, along with the remains of the roasted chicken. Team Minestrone added zucchini, green bell pepper, cauliflower, garlic, red pepper flakes, a can of tomatoes, and the rind of some Parmigiano-Reggiano.

“You can also just start any pot of soup with half a roast chicken, whether you’ve bought it or you’ve made it, and go from there. It’s an easy shortcut,” Lisa said. “If you keep your pantry stocked with some basics it’s super easy to pull together a soup with minimal effort. I usually have canned tomatoes on hand, coconut milk, curry paste, rice, some type of pasta, dried beans, bacon, fresh herbs, stock, onions, carrots, celery, some dried chili pods. That’s about it, that’s most of my pantry. Everything else is accessories.”

Often, the difference between boring soup and fabulous soup is just time. Soup almost always has to simmer for at least an hour, usually two. It takes time to draw all the flavors out of the components. “Trying to boil it like mad for a half hour is not going to trick the laws of cooking into thinking it’s simmered for two hours,” Lisa said.

As if on cue, Ted sauntered into the kitchen. “I heard there was some stock action going on in here,” he said. Ted is a stock aficionado; he once penned a two-thousand-word missive on the subject. “Thought I’d just drop by and have a look.”

I waved him in. “So, stock is the extra bonus from a roast chicken,” I started. “You can just simmer the bones with some vegetables. One chicken can generate a couple of quarts of stock. Considering that you pay two or three dollars for a quart of chicken stock, it’s worth it not to throw them away. When it comes to the vegetables for stock, some of them can be odds and ends or trimmings you might normally throw away, like the hard heel of celery, scraps of onion, and the tough green tops of leeks. Those can all go into stock.”

Over the weekend, I had rounded up plastic bags marked “For chicken stock” and “For beef stock” from my freezer. I never let a bone go, whether it comes from a chicken I’ve broken down, hot wings that I made at home, or even leftovers from restaurants.

Not long before the class, we ate at the Space Needle Restaurant with friends from out of town. Mike and his friend Bill ordered the day’s special, a twenty-five-ounce steak that had a Flintstones-style bone jutting from the meat. The server looked at me like I was a crazy woman when I told him I wanted to take home the bones, but he good-naturedly wrapped them up in a takeout bag. As we waited for the elevator, the Italian maître d’ asked what was in the bag. His face lit up. “Ah, now, that’s a smart cook! I never understand why people leave without them! My nana would kill for bones like that.”

I’d roasted all the bones and made most of them into stock. I kept a small pan of each set of bones to show off the result of roasting. The chicken bones had a crisp quality and a mahogany color in some places where the bone was exposed, and wept brown puddles of caramelized goodness onto the pan. The beef bones looked dried and nearly charred, like trees in a forest recently ravaged by fire.

I had Ted take over the explanation. For chicken, beef, veal, or other meat-based stock, the method remains the same. “You can just simmer chicken in water with the vegetables. That’s known as white stock,” Ted said. “But you’ll get more flavor if you roast the bones first. You want your oven nice and hot, around 400 degrees. The goal is to caramelize the bones a bit. About a half hour or forty-five minutes is usually enough. When you can really start to smell them, that’s when you’re getting somewhere.”

I waved everyone over to the big stove. “Okay, here are the two pots of stock that I made from the rest of the bones. They’ve been simmering about two hours. I want you to smell it and taste it.”

Lisa handed everyone a spoon. Each person dutifully sniffed the gurgling liquids, then dipped her spoon in and sipped a taste. They looked thoughtfully at one another. “It reminds me of the stock tasting,” Cheryl said. “It’s more meaty and chickeny.”

“So you take the browned bones, put them in a pot, and cover them with cold water. It’s great to add some water to the roasting pans while they’re hot and scrape up any browned bits left in them,” Ted said. “It will clean your pans and boost the flavor of your stock. Add vegetables, typically onion, carrot, and celery. The usual ratio is one pound of vegetables for every three pounds of bones. Add a bay leaf, some thyme, parsley. Some people like to add whole peppercorns and some garlic.”

The point is to simmer them for as long as it takes for “the bones to give their all,” as Julia Child once wrote. For chicken, that’s usually two to four hours; for beef, about double that.

Ted pulled a ladle from among the coterie of utensils and demonstrated a key technique. First he skimmed off a slight oil slick on the top of the stock, and then tackled an island of bubbling foam. “Skimming simply means to do a seek-and-destroy of any foam or fat on the surface,” Ted said. “It makes a world of difference to both stock and soup. It keeps it from being greasy, for one thing.”

Ted had a few other points on meat-based stocks. “Try not to boil it or it will turn cloudy. What you want to do is get it superhot and then reduce the heat until you get the occasional, or ‘lazy,’ bubble. Don’t add salt. As the water evaporates, the salt flavor will concentrate and it can be too salty.”

Since Lisa had brought in her soup book for show-and-tell, I opened a copy of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison. During my fling with vegetarianism, I started to make vegetable stocks, a habit that I keep up. “They’re built the same way. Roast the vegetables and then simmer for about a half hour. This book has a great section on vegetable stocks.” I flipped through the section. “There’s a whole breakdown of vegetables to use by season, stocks for stirfries and curries, mushroom stock, and even tomato-style stock. You just want to avoid strong flavors such as cabbage, beets, broccoli, or, as she puts it, ‘funky or spoiled’ vegetables that you wouldn’t eat.”

Next, we moved on to fish stock. In French, it’s known as “fish fumet,” a common foundation in chowders and seafood dishes. I had bought two pounds of fish bones for a dollar from my regular fishmonger, an assortment of fragile skeletons and thick pieces of white bones from larger fish.

“A lot of recipes will call for clam juice, but what the food writer really wants you to use is fish stock.” Personally, I loathe clam juice. Most supermarket varieties are simply too brackish. “Even the cheap stuff is almost three bucks for eight ounces, so you’re paying twelve dollars for a quart. You want white fish without too strong a flavor. No mackerel, no salmon.” I combined some onion, celery, half a lemon, a bay leaf, a few sprigs of parsley, and the fish bones in a pot with cold water.

“You can do the same thing with shrimp, crab, or lobster shells, too. I sometimes get Dungeness crab shells from my fish market. They’re free and it’s awesome in gumbo,” I said.

Together, Ted and I strained the pot of gurgling chicken stock. “If you’ve got a big pot, don’t try to pour it out. Remove the bones with tongs, and then ladle the liquid out.” He ladled the stock through a mesh sieve lined with cheesecloth over a massive bowl. “This is traditional but a colander with a coffee filter works, too.” After the chicken, he strained the fish fumet.

“I’m totally not digging that smell,” Dri said of the fumet. “I mean, I guess it’s good for chowder, but it’s pretty fishy.” Sabra nodded. She wasn’t into it either.

A hot steaming pot of stock cools slowly and has a tendency to linger in what food safety types refer to as the “danger zone,” or temperatures between 40 and 140 degrees. “You want to make sure your stock stays out of the danger zone by cooling it quickly,” Ted said. “You can do a few things. Take the stock and put it into an ice bath in the sink and keep stirring. You can pour it into a shallow pan, like the bottom of broiler. Or you can wait until the stock cools below 180 degrees and then plop plastic bags filled with ice into the stock. Whatever, once it cools to room temperature or below, put it into the fridge right away.”

The other option is the remarkably low-tech “cold porch” method, Lisa added. “In winter, I just put a big pan of stock outside uncovered and stir it every so often until it cools down.”

“Stock is made from bones, broth is not. Technically, there’s no such thing as vegetable stock. But since people aren’t sure, a lot of things are called stock interchangeably with broth.”

We went back to the soups. Team Chicken finished theirs by tossing in handfuls of pasta left over from the pasta class, shredded cooked chicken, and chopped fresh parsley and oregano. Team Minestrone added chopped tomatoes, a can of red beans, then garnished each bowl with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and chopped basil.

The streetlights came on outside. Each person slurped the various soups. Lisa produced a bottle of cava from the fridge. With great drama, she launched the cork and we all toasted.

Then the mood turned bittersweet as the volunteers reluctantly took off their aprons and dropped their diapers into the bag we hauled around for the dirty laundry.

After they left, Lisa, Ted, and I did a final cleanup in the kitchen. I stayed behind to mop. Alone in the kitchen, I dragged the bright yellow roller and swished the mottled gray-yarn mop across the black-and-white tile. I was deep into the Zen of the rhythmic motion when my phone rang.

My stepfather, Eddie, had suffered from an impressive string of maladies in the past dozen years. A recent surgery had left him weak, and since then he’d been falling. That morning, he collapsed and broke a chair. My mother tried for forty-five minutes to get him up. An ER doctor diagnosed him with pneumonia, a serious illness for a seventy-eight-year-old who already had enough health problems.

This time I heard something different in my mother’s voice: sheer exhaustion. He’d barely slept for a week. I knew that as his caretaker, she hadn’t either. “Mom, I’m coming home,” I told her. She insisted that it wasn’t necessary. I hung up and called Mike, then I finished mopping the floor. By the time I got home, Mike had booked me a ticket to leave the next afternoon.

In Florida, the relief on Mom’s face said it all. She looked as if she’d aged years. Eddie’s gaunt appearance threw me. A thin guy by nature, he’d lost twenty-five pounds. His cheeks had an unhealthy hollow. As I hugged him, I asked, “What can I do for you, Eddie?”

“Make me dinner?” he asked. “It’s not like I travel now. The highlight of my day is hitting Walgreens for prescriptions. Food is all that I have to look forward to.”

That week, my sister, Sandy, and I spent two full days making huge vats of food, from spaghetti with meatballs to beef stew to scalloped potatoes. Fresh from the soup class, I cleared out my mother’s fridge to make three different varieties, including chicken noodle, Eddie’s favorite. Ever competitive, Sandy made Eddie’s all-time favorite meal, a classic full-on Thanksgiving spread replete with turkey, mashed potatoes with gravy, and homemade stuffing. We diligently labeled and froze all of it into portions sized for two—enough for two months’ worth of meals.

Doing this gave my exhausted mom a break from both shopping and cooking. She rested, and we took long walks on the beach together. The stockpile of varied foods kept Eddie interested in eating. Each morning, she’d open the freezer and ask what he wanted. “How about we have the turkey gumbo for lunch and the cassoulet for dinner?” He gained back some weight and his condition improved. Before leaving for the airport, he gave me a lingering hug as he thanked me for the meals. “I can tell with every bite that you love us.”

As I sat on the plane back to Seattle, I thought about the power of cooking to nourish, to comfort, and to heal. It was the fourth time in one year that I had contributed meals to people’s freezers in the midst of a crisis: Mike’s sister had gone through chemotherapy for breast cancer, a friend’s husband had had surgery to remove a brain tumor, and our friend Amy had suffered life-threatening complications after the birth of her son.

It’s a simple act, but to bring someone chicken soup when they’re sick is not just about a meal, it’s a tangible and physical sign of caring. If you buy a chicken and make it from scratch, the message is completely different from bringing over a can. It says, “You’re important, and I care about you enough to take the time to help restore you.” Like laughter, soup is not the same when it’s canned.

Blissfully Simple Chicken Stock