Healing with Chicken Soup: Part 1

The past few weeks have brought the world a lot of pain and tragedy (a lot more than usual, anyway). In fact, if you visit any major news website (such as here or there), you’ll see in stark reds and whites headlines burdened with telling unsettling stories about the monstrous things that are plaguing the world. The microscopic monsters (known collectively as the flu) that have been making me miserable for the past weeks pale in comparison to those other trials and tribulations.

Courtesy of Past Expiry Cartoons

Naturally, these events have me reflecting on how precious life is, on how we should never take anything for granted, not health, family, peace, or even food. It turns out that even chicken soup has its merits. Scientific, healthful merits. It is certainly powerless to save the world or fix its problems, but it comforts me to know that chicken soup (the literal one, not necessarily the literary, soulful ones) can help you and me the next time flu bugs pay a visit. 

Many of us take this time-honored, classic comfort food for granted, dismissing its healing powers as the stuff of backwoods myth or Old World folklore. We tell ourselves that what makes it so comforting is its warmth and mildness, the ease with which one can prepare and consume it when down in the doldrums of sickness. Or perhaps we simply associate the humble chicken soups in our lives with the nurturing care that we have received from a loved one over the years. Writer Peggy Orenstein, for instance, sees chicken soup as her grandmother’s legacy:

“It may not be jewelry or candlesticks or a graveyard of ancestors, but it is what I have to pass on: Chicken soup. A legacy of making much out of little, a legacy of love that will cure whatever ails you.” 

In the article "Soul for the Chicken Soup," New York Time’s writer Ed Levine would have us think what Molly O’Neill writes in the “New York Cookbook”: “Chicken soup is synonymous with New York City.” In a fanciful elaboration of her point, O’Neill says: “An epicurean archeologist could piece together a social history of the city, simply by studying the permutations of its chicken soup.” On the other hand, NYT writer Jennifer B. Lee commented in her article "Soup's On! (And It's Not Your Grandmother's)": “A mock court once […] [ruled] that chicken soup deserved the title of ‘Jewish penicillin'.” And if we are to believe the sometimes dubious Wikipedia, this comfort food, give or take a few ingredients, can be found anywhere from China and Taiwan to the United Kingdom and Ireland, from Poland and Romania to the United States and Canada! Interestingly, Ornstein’s grandmother’s Eastern European origins are reflected in her particular recipe for the dish:

“My grandmother’s recipe for that iconic dish was simple, a peasant’s meal: they made do with little in the Eastern European shtetls, so a chicken, a few carrots, an onion, the crumbs that made the matzo balls were all stretched as far as possible.”

Wherever you get your chicken soup, whatever secondary ingredients and steps you use to get that final classic broth, rest assured that the tradition of looking to chicken soup for help with our miscellaneous ailments has your grandmother's blessing, along with that of the scientific community. For a discussion of what these lab-coated, chicken soup-wielding scientists had to say about it, along with help making some of your own, check back in the next few days for part two of this post!

Dear readers, wherever you are in the world today, I hope that you are healthy and at peace. If these things are out of your reach at the moment, you have my sympathy, my best wishes, and my hope that you can turn to something for solace, be it a higher power, a loved one, a silver lining, or even, simply, a bowl of chicken soup.