Published March 1, 1996.
A broth developed from an Edna Lewis recipe makes full-flavored chicken noodle soup possible in less than ninety minutes.
It's all too easy to make weak, characterless chicken soup from scratch. And, when making broth, it can be bothersome to strain out and throw away all that celery, carrot, and onion, only to turn around and chop more of the same for the soup. The problem, obviously, stems from the broth.
A robust chicken soup that was easy to make and tasted so good that we'd long to be sick.
Our winning recipe was based on one from Edna Lewis's In Pursuit of Flavor(Knopf, 1988). Rather than simmering chicken bones, aromatic vegetables, and herbs for hours, Lewis's recipe called for sautéing a chicken, hacked into small pieces, with an onion until the chicken lost its raw color. The pot was then covered and the chicken and onion cooked over low heat until they released their rich, flavorful juices, 15 to 20 minutes. Only at that point was water added, and the broth was simmered just 20 minutes longer. In the end, this broth was too strong. Rather than using the whole chicken for the broth, we removed the breast and reserved it for the final soup. The rest of the bird----the legs, back, wings, and giblets----are tossed into the stockpot. Like Lewis, we included onion in the broth but found that using celery and carrot neither added nor detracted from the final soup, so we left them out of the broth and later added them to make the soup. Cutting the chicken into small pieces is the most difficult part of making this soup. A meat cleaver, a heavy-duty chef's knife, or a pair of heavy-duty kitchen shears makes the task fairly simple.
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