There's an apple in my soup

Helpful tips from a low-stakes cook

Can winging it ever trump following a recipe? The know-how of experts who have tweaked and refined a dish so that you, the home cook, don’t have to? Who, at the time of writing, at least, believe that they have found the perfect iteration of a recipe? (Unless of course they belong to that contemptible species of gatekeeper cooks who omit a crucial ingredient or process, and for whom I believe a special place in hell exists).

I rarely follow recipes, but when I wrote my memoir, Ida at my Table, the book ended up containing no fewer than thirty eight. Some were my own inventions, simple dishes I used to make at home when our children were small, like steamed broccoli with oil and vinegar, or the scrappy make-do-and mend community cooking we did during lockdown, where we were working with short-date food delivered twice a week. A Felix Project consignment could include anything from Harrods marrons glacés to cannisters of Macdonalds spray cream, or six crates of of wilting brassicas. Because I’m not a “real” cook, the utter randomness of those ingredients, their seemingly set-in-stone incompatibility, would flick some kind of perverse switch in my brain, and I would find a way of combining them in the meals we prepared for local shielding and vulnerable residents. When one Felix Project delivery contained mountains of kale, I decided to make pesto with it, substituting the pine nuts with a tub of almond butter, which created a fantastic emollient for the pasta, while I replaced the parmesan with lemon zest for an affordable hit of umami.

Community meals ready to be delivered

Going through the Felix deliveries

The remainder of the recipes in my memoir were inheritance dishes, beautifully calibrated examples of Italian regional cooking passed down through the family I married in to. Ida, my mother in law’s Vincisgrassi, the the Lasagne of the Marche or her hand-rolled tagliatelle, as well as Avi, her son’s, slightly more experimental take on the same traditional ingredients. Quick pearl barley “risorzo” made with porcini mushrooms, butter and parmesan, or pasta with fried vine tomatoes which could be rustled up in the time it took for the water to boil, or a red cabbage and tomato salad with tahini, a nod to his childhood in Haifa.

The idea of codifying those recipes was was antithetical to my usual modus operandi (both in the kitchen and in life), but my sister-in-law, Clara, helped, along with my friend, Natascha, who would heavily annotate each one with question marks and deletions. The next stage involved a brilliant group of friends and customers who divvied up all thirty eight of the recipes and practiced them at home, querying ingredients and processes such as the need to blanch greens before pan-frying them, or whether jarred canellini beans would work as well as dried in a stew. (Yes, and no). Next, Clara came over from Rome for a week of intense sibling recipe testing over Christmas, while the final stage involved submitting the manuscript to my publisher, for a final round of corrections.

Recipes are cultural signifiers; they don’t exist in a vacuum. They talk to eachother in a language which is instantly recognisable to anyone interested in food, and which can feel alienating and elitist to someone who is not confident the kitchen. Food historians have traced the DNA of dishes across continents and timelines. And, while that DNA can be - and often is - contested by the guardians of those recipes, it is a brave home cook who thinks they know better.

I am such a cook, though, admittedly, the stakes are low when I tweak a recipe. I may be a restaurateur who married into a family who speaks “food” as though it’s a real language, but my own childhood in seventies and eighties Britain was anything but foodie. As a result, there is no ancestral voice in my ear telling me non si fa così, or that’s not how you do it.

Which would explain how the other day I found myself surreptitiously dropping an apple into a pot of chicken soup. That recipe was a gift from my mother in law, and is one we make all the time at home. We use brodo di pollo to emulsify meat dishes like polpette, or as a soup with the addition of pasta or passatelli, (noodles made of old bread, egg, lemon-zest and parmesan, ) or simply drunk in a cup as a mid-morning pick me up with a squeeze of lemon.

Ida taught me how to use the best chicken you can afford (never a greasy carcass from yesterday’s roast) plus a piece of stewing steak, along with whole celery, tomatoes, carrots and onions. Once the soup has started to blip, you skim off the denaturised proteins that rise to the surface, and only then do you add salt. Which is where, rookie cook that I am, I came unstuck.

Ida’s chicken soup

If you have grown up in the UK, you’ll be used to seasoning your dishes - even pasta water - with fine table, or sea, salt. In Italy, however, there are always two salt caddies sitting beside the cooker: majolica pots with fist-sized openings at the bottom that resemble miniature fireplaces , or else little hinged trunks with wooden lids - one for sale grosso, and one for sale fino. In spite of all my years living in Italy, I never got the hang of sale grosso, what in this country we would call coarse salt. And which is why, when I absent-mindedly added a handful to my chicken soup, I realised straight away that it was too much.

At first, I tried to dilute it by topping up the pan with more water, but even though the saltiness was less pronounced, the balance of flavours remained frustratingly out whack. Adding yet more water still didn’t solve the problem, so I resorted to a fairly well-known trick of dropping a whole starchy potato into it. After an hour or so, the potato had softened, but the soup still had a dispiriting one-note quality to it, masking the bright clean taste of the celery. Acid, in the form of tomatoes or lemon, is sometimes used to counteract too much salt, but adding either ingredient at this stage of the process would have ruined the delicate, almost neutral, taste of the two poached meats.

So, in went my apple; and, reader, it worked like a charm.

Ida’s Chicken Soup (Serves 6-8)

Ingredients

1 large free-range chicken, preferably organic

2 large tomatoes, or 2 handfuls of cherry tomatoes

Approximately 500g beef roasting joint, or similar (optional)

a handful of parsley stalks

2 large carrots, peeled

2 large onions, peeled

2 celery sticks

1 bay leaf , fresh or dried

salt

Method

Take an 8–10 litre stock pot, and fill around two-thirds with water.

Place all the ingredients inside, and cook on a medium heat until the soup begins to bubble.

Then take a small sieve or tea strainer, and periodically skim off the greyish scum (denatured proteins, similar to egg whites) that will rise to the surface.

Once the broth is clear, add a couple of tbsp of salt, and simmer with the lid half on, half off for at least 4 hours. You can top up the water if the level gets too low, and add more salt if you think it needs it.

Ideally, you’d like your soup blipping on the stove for a whole afternoon, but if you want to have it for supper that day, you won’t have a chance to remove the fat before eating it. (Or, rather, you will, but not the deeply satisfying beeswax-yellow 'lid' that forms once it has been kept in the fridge overnight, which can be lifted off virtually intact.)

Depending on how fatty your chicken was to start off with, when it’s done, the surface of the brodo will either be constellated by little dots of oil, or else there will be slicks of it floating on the top.

If you want to serve your soup straight away, turn off the heat, and tear off about six sheets of kitchen paper.

Lay them one at a time on the surface of the pan, leave for a couple of seconds, and remove. The first few sheets should come out stained orange, but once the kitchen paper emerges transparent, most of the fat will have gone.

If on the other hand you’re not planning to eat the soup that day, strain it, and, once it is cool, place it in the fridge in a covered container, then remove the fat 'lid' in the morning.

Discard the tomatoes, chicken bones, onions, bay leaves and parsley stalks, while the meat, celery, and carrots can be put in a separate box to be turned into a brand-new set of meals.

If you managed to cook it for a long time, it’s possible that overnight, your soup will have turned into aspic. Whatever you do, don’t confuse this exquisite, amber jelly with fat; it is pure collagen, and a sign that you have struck brodo gold.

Both the broth and the scraps should keep in the fridge for around 3–4 days