Have you ever thought about how people cooked long before we had fancy kitchens with stainless steel ovens, four-burner cooktops, and outdoor barbecue islands?
I’m talking about biblical times, when clans and families roamed as nomads, tending to their flocks, or settled in walled cities with thatched roofs over their heads. Open fires—outside the tent or inside a courtyard—served a dual purpose: they kept folks warm and provided a means of cooking. For the latter activity, they usually rigged poles to hang a heavy bronze pot over a robust fire.
Back then, the main meals of the day—served afternoon and early evening—came out of that large pot. Cooking often meant tossing a slab of boned-in meat or a whole fish into a pot or kettle and adding green vegetables, legumes, herbs, and whatever else was available. This main dish stew simmered for hours, perhaps overnight, before it was ready to be served. The everything-cooked-in-one-pot-cuisine was eaten over and over until nothing was left. Families often ate the same meal for days.
Cooking pots played a supporting role in everyday life and were referred to often in the Old Testament. Here are a few examples:
◼ Cooking pots are first mentioned in Exodus when the whole community of Israel grumbled about Moses and Aaron while they wandered in the wilderness. They complained that back in Egypt, “we sat around pots filled with meat and ate all the bread we wanted” (Exodus 16:3 NLT).
◼ In Leviticus, where the Hebrew nation was told which meats were clean and which were “detestable,” they were directed to boil sacrificial meat in bronze pots and then thoroughly scour and rinse those pots (Leviticus 6:28).
◼ The prophet Ezekiel prophesied that Jaazaniah and Pelatiah were planning evil and giving wicked counsel in Jerusalem. In Ezekiel 11, the two men told the people in Jerusalem that they were like an iron pot. The people would be “safe as meat inside the pot,” but the Lord said, “This city is an iron pot all right, but the pieces of meat are the victims of your injustice” (Ezekiel 11:7 NLT).
Stocks, bone broths, and soups have been used by ancient cultures for health purposes throughout the ages. Today, we just don’t consume these nourishing foods very often, if at all, but we should. I think making one-pot meals or fresh soups using a homemade stock or broth would be a wonderful way to go back to the future.
These meals are incredibly cleansing and building and will change your thinking about what constitutes a dinner meal, which in most households is traditionally a slice of meat, a side of starch, and hopefully a serving of veggies. I urge you to be intentional about preparing and consuming one-pot meals and hearty soups made with real old-fashioned stock. Preparing these types of meals is a lost art these days, but with a little forethought, you can serve one of the most satisfying meals there is. On a cold winter’s evening— or any other season of the year, for that matter—there’s nothing better than a bowl of homemade soup.
I’ve sung the praises of homemade chicken soup in my previous books, but I have to say that the idea of cooking soups and meals in a single pot is a part of my family’s history, as evidenced by my Grandmother Rose. You see, my grandmother grew up in a pastoral Polish village in the 1920s, the youngest of seven children born to Gidalia and Simma Katz. Even though her father owned a mill that pressed poppy seeds and flaxseeds into oil, they were considered poor, certainly by today’s standards. On many occasions, there wasn’t much to eat.
Here’s how her parents fed a family of nine during hard times. It all began when one of them would go to the backyard chicken coop and wring a hen’s neck. After plucking the feathers, the chicken would be placed in a massive cast-iron pot filled with water. A fire brought the pot to a boil and was allowed to simmer overnight. The next day, young Rose and her siblings dipped cakes of pressed flaxseeds and poppy seeds into the rendered fat that rose to the top, which was known by the Yiddish name as schmaltz. When food was scarce, this was a tasty treat.
After the schmaltz was skimmed off, the stock—which included the meat, bones, and cartilage—was used to feed her large family for an entire week— all from one chicken! What nine Katz family members received was a week’s worth of extremely nutritious meals loaded with minerals, collagen, cartilage, and electrolytes. They also received generous amounts of natural gelatin, an odorless, tasteless substance that was extracted from the bones and animal tissues during the boiling process.
Everything for Grandma Rose and her family started with the stock, a liquid made from simmering meat scraps and bones.
Today, no self-respecting chef would consider making one of his signature dishes without having stock on hand. Auguste Escoffier, considered the father of modern French classical cooking, once said, “Indeed, stock is everything in cooking … without it nothing can be done.”
You don’t have to be a French-trained chef to make a great stock, but you should use the bones of organic, pasture-raised cattle, lamb, or bison, pasture-raised chickens, or wild-caught fish. Stock or bone broth begins with rinsing the bones in cold water and then dropping them into a heavy-bottomed stockpot. Water is added to cover the bones, and everything is brought to a boil. Then the heat is reduced to a simmer for a minimum of twelve hours and as long as seventy-two hours. As evaporation takes its toll, you may add water once or twice during the cooking process to sufficiently cover the bones. Any layer on the surface of the water is to be skimmed off.
If you desire to make a more robust stock and to embellish upon the aforementioned bone broth, you may add to the bones a combination of vegetables (chopped carrots, celery, onion, etc.) as well as herbs, which is to be simmered along with the meaty bones. Any impurities that rise to the surface can be skimmed. You would then strain out the bones and residual veggies and have an amazing elixir that you can consume warm or use as a base for soups, grains, etc. I often recommend to people with very compromised digestion go on a broth or stock fast for a number of days to settle their system.
The best bones for making stock are cattle bones with a lot of cartilage and marrow, such as the so-called “knuckle bones” found in the various leg joints. Making stock from chicken or fish can start with a whole chicken or fish, but a great stock can be made just from the bones.
Starting with cold water seems to extract more collagen from the bones, which produces a stock with more body. You don’t want to continuously boil the bones. After the initial boiling, set the stove on simmer. There’s no need to stir the bones. Just be sure to keep skimming the layer off the top and to keep adding water when needed.
The essential qualities of stock—its aroma, richness, as well as many of its health-giving properties—come from the marrow of the bones. Marrow is the spongy matter inside the hard calcified matrix of the bones, from which arises blood and bone cells as well as the connective tissues—collagen—that hold your bones together. The connective tissue or collagen breaks down to form the gelatin that gives the stock body and staying power. You know you have a good stock when upon refrigeration, the appearance is a very thick gelatinous substance that is in a single, wonderful blob.
The bones used to make stock determine the kind of stock that will be produced:
◼ Brown stock comes from beef or veal bones, and some prefer to brown the bones in an oven before dropping them into the pot.
◼ Chicken stock, as you would surmise, is made from chicken bones or typically whole chickens.
◼ Fish stock is made from fish bones and trimmings left over after filleting.
◼ White stock is made from a combination of beef and chicken bones.
I would imagine that you’re looking at this list and saying, I can do that. All I have to do get some leftover bones from the butcher.
Not so fast. Just as it’s important and much healthier to eat pasture-fed beef, bison, or lamb, it’s just as essential to use the bones from quality organic, pasture-raised sources to make your stock. Otherwise, you’re taking two steps forward and one step backward in your march toward a healthier lifestyle.
You may be shocked to hear this, but it’s hard to find bones from pasture-raised organic cattle this days. There must be some good word-of-mouth going around about the health properties of stocks and soups to drive up demand; either that, or there are a lot of bone broth cleansing fasts going on. If you stroll into a large health food grocery store, you’re likely not to find any bones in the meat department. They often sell out the day they come in, even though they can be a bit pricey. It’s not unusual to pay $20 for a three-pound package of bones from organic, grass-fed sources.
Based on the tremendous demand, we have decided to offer bones from our Beyond Organic beef and to create a delicious and nutritious bone broth so that folks all across the U.S. can enjoy the many benefits. There has been many a day when I have consumed warm or room-temperature strained beef bone broth or stock out of a tall glass before each meal. I love it so much that I often consume a pint at a time. Upon consuming, I immediately feel great.
The nutritional advantages of bone broth and stock—from calcium to phosphorus to collagen to magnesium—are noteworthy. We don’t have Beyond Organic beef stock available year round, and when we do offer it, we sell out quickly.
One area where you’ll always find a good supply of stock bones is with chickens. Use the entire bird to make a delicious and nutritious chicken soup. The recuperative effects of chicken soup date as far back as the 12th century when the Jewish physician and philosopher Moses Maimonides recommended its use to improve respiratory health. In our family, homemade chicken soup was known as “Jewish penicillin,” a testament to how chicken soup acts to support healthy inflammation.
Stephen Rennard, M.D., chief of pulmonary medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska, conducted a full-blown study on the health-promoting qualities of chicken soup. He had his wife prepared a batch using a recipe from her Lithuanian grandmother. Then Dr. Rennard carted the homemade chicken soup to his laboratory, where he combined some of the soup with neutrophils to see what would happen. Neutrophils are a type of white blood cells that rush to attack an invader, which can cause fluid buildup in the pulmonary region.
As Dr. Rennard suspected, his wife’s homemade chicken soup demonstrated that neutrophils showed less of a tendency to congregate, but at the same time, these neutrophils did not lose any of their ability to fight off toxins. His findings were published in CHEST, the peer-reviewed journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.
I’m glad that modern science is catching up to the news that chicken soup is good for the soul. Grandma Rose passed the best recipe for chicken soup on to me, a recipe based, no doubt, on the chicken soup that fueled her family in Poland in the dark days of near famine. I still haven’t forgotten how she made chicken soup every few days and fed it to me when, at age twenty, I was bedridden with my health challenges.
That’s why I’m sharing a new twist on my Grandma Rose’s Chicken Soup recipe here, which includes directions. All you need are the right ingredients and a large stainless steel pot. One thing that Grandma Rose always added to her chicken soup recipe was cayenne pepper, which she said would clear the sinuses. I have also added the powerful spice turmeric to enhance the health benefits.
HEALING CHICKEN SOUP
Ingredients
1 whole chicken (free range, pastured, or organic chicken)
3 to 4 quarts filtered water
1 tablespoon raw apple cider vinegar or Terrain Living herbal of choice
4 medium-sized onions, coarsely chopped
8 carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped
6 celery stalks, coarsely chopped
2 to 4 zucchinis, chopped
1 pound green beans
4 tablespoons of extra-virgin coconut oil
1 bunch parsley
1 cup fresh or frozen green peas
5 garlic cloves
2 inches grated ginger
2 inches grated turmeric
2 to 4 tablespoons of high mineral sea salt
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper (optional)
Directions
If you are using a whole chicken, remove giblets, neck, and any loose fat from the cavity. Place chicken or chicken pieces and chicken feet (optional) in a large stainless steel pot.
Next, add vinegar or the Terrain Living Herbal of your choice and all vegetables except parsley. Bring to a boil and simmer for 12 to 24 hours. The longer you cook the stock, the healthier the stock will be. About 30 minutes before turning off the stove, add parsley. This will impart additional mineral ions to the broth. Remove the parsley. Remove the chicken and de-bone, discard, or compost the bones. Add back the meat. Serve warm and refrigerate remaining soup once it reaches just above room temperature.
Grandma Rose’s chicken soup is highly recommended during the winter to support the body’s immune system and to support healthy inflammation levels. The high-fiber vegetables and healthy broth are wonderful for cleansing the body’s digestive system and delicious to eat as well, especially when freezing temperatures and gray skies are the norm.
Keep in mind that stocks, broths, and bone soups are to joints and inflammation what fermented foods are to gut health. Meat stocks and bone broths promote a healthy inflammation response as well as joint health and flexibility because these meat stocks contain protein, minerals, gelatin, and fiber in a form that’s easy for the body to assimilate. Gelatin from cartilage and marrow is the superstar compound, containing half of the essential amino acids we need for survival. One of those amino acids is glycine, which is needed by the liver to remove toxins from our system. Another amino acid, lysine, helps the body to absorb calcium and to build muscle.
The reason gelatin has unique powers is because of the way it attracts liquid molecules to it, which makes the digestion of cooked food easier. It’s the same principle with raw foods, which contain hydrophilic colloids that attract water. Similarly, when cooked foods are served with gelatin—homemade chicken soup, for instance—the gelatin naturally binds to water and helps the food move through the digestive tract efficiently.
Gelatin also has what is called a protein-sparing effect. What protein-sparing means is that even though there might be only a gram or less of protein in a serving of strained bone broth or soup, for example, the body reacts like it received far more protein. Protein-sparing means your muscles are not wasting away but rather remain intact and strong.
The last point I want to make about broths, soups, and stocks is that besides conferring many health benefits, they also immeasurably add to the flavor of food. The rich sauces and exquisite cuisine you experience in expensive French restaurants begin with pots of stock simmering on the back burners in the restaurant kitchen. When classically trained chefs take a few ladles of this stock and put them into a saucepan, add wine and herbs and turn up the heat, they are making a reduction sauce to flavor your entrée or side dish. The good news is that the effects of the gelatin and the flavors become even more concentrated during the reduction process.
Yes, it takes time and forethought to prepare stocks and to make homemade stews, soups, and reduction sauces, but just think of the innumerable health benefits you and your family will receive.
You’ll also go up several notches in your culinary skills!