Soup TXT_Layout 1 5/19/14 1:11 PM Page 163
7
Chicken and Other Poultry Soups
Chicken goes with soup the way bread goes with butter. The words are permanently linked in our minds and in our bowls. Chicken soups are the ultimate comfort food. You don’t see Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen writing books titled Gazpacho for the Soul, do you? It doesn’t matter if the temperature in the air is the same 101ºF that your thermometer is registering for your fever. If you’re sick, you want a steaming bowl of chicken soup. That’s true around the world, too. That’s why the recipes in this chapter run the gamut from Asian to Hispanic cuisines and from soups based on clear broth to soups rich with cream.
has more than just a placebo effect. They looked at how chicken soup affected airflow and mucus in the noses of 15 volunteers who drank cold water, hot water, or chicken soup. In general, the warm fluids helped increase the movement of nasal mucus, but chicken soup did a better job than the hot water. Chicken soup also improves the function of protective cilia, the tiny hair-like projections in the nose that prevent contagions from entering the body, according to a 1998 Coping with Allergies and Asthma report.
Health Benefits
Hearty chicken and turkey soups are a favorite way to stretch leftovers (the summer reruns of the food world) to feed a crowd, and some of the recipes in this chapter are written to use cooked chicken or turkey. If you don’t have any leftovers, you can buy half of a rotisserie chicken at the supermarket. But a bigger problem arises if a recipe calls for cooking the chicken and you want to use one you’ve already cooked. If it’s a small amount of chicken—like a pound of boneless breast or thigh meat—feel free to use what you have on hand, but add it at the end of the cooking time rather than at the beginning. If a recipe calls for a lot of chicken, however, like the Chicken Soup with Matzo Balls (page 164), it’s better to save that recipe for another time and choose one of the other temptations.
There is evidence to support the idea that chicken stock really does have medicinal qualities; perhaps your grandma was right all along. In 2000, University of Nebraska Medical Center researcher Dr. Stephen Rennard published a study printed in the international medical journal Chest—the Cardiopulmonary and Critical Care Journal—stating that chicken soup contains a number of substances, including an antiinflammatory mechanism, that ease the symptoms of upper respiratory tract infections. Other studies showed that the chicken soup was equally medicinal if made without vegetables; it was the chicken itself that helped. Another study, conducted by researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami and published in Chest in 1998, also suggests that chicken soup
Using Up the Leftovers
163
