My Turn: We want only the best for our loved ones
As usual, my wife and I were in a rush, so we opened up a quart of chicken soup from the store instead of making our own. This was to be a treat for our twin grandsons, 5, who we were about to babysit. Not knowing if it was it too hot or too cold, we decided to taste it.
Too much salt.
This soup probably started from a plastic-wrapped, naked chicken that was previously frozen. The carrots looked like they were prepackaged — no greens attached. The rest of the denuded produce most likely came from outside the country, and certainly not from a local farm stand.
Soup, chicken soup, any food, should be enjoyed for its natural flavors, not by adding a flavor stimulant like salt. A lesson I learned years ago from my grandmother, my bubbie.
That’s something Bubbie would have never done: adding extra flavors when they are not needed.
Everything Bubbie used was fresh, not packaged, no additives and no preservatives. When Bubbie bought her chickens, it was at the poultry store — feathers, feet and all. For milk and eggs, it was the dairy store. The milk was pasteurized, not homogenized, with the cream sitting on top of the milk.
For beef or chicken — no pork — it was to the butcher shop. For meatloaf or burgers, the beef was ground to order. For cake, it was the bakery. For produce, it was a stroll along Pitkin Avenue to shop the pushcarts. No supermarkets and definitely no big-box stores. I know — I was there.
My grandparents’ apartment was on Rockaway Avenue in East New York. Those streets were my after-school playground, where I enjoyed box ball, stoop ball and skully. The apartment was filled with aromas from Bubbie’s cooking. Bubbie was always busy: baking, peeling or plucking. Then there was me playing with toys from the chest of drawers in the bedroom and occasionally sneaking into the porcelain cookie jar. When the soup came, it was joined with the matzo ball that floated in that heavenly brew.
That was, of course, until Grandpa came home all covered in white dust. His job as a mason was grueling, and all he wanted to do was to sit and enjoy a cold beer and a half sour kosher pickle while he waited for his dinner. A large, burly man, he sat with his back to the kitchen. He was facing me across from what was, to me, a gigantic kitchen table.
There I was, his solo grandson, no other cousins around to divert his attention. I felt really special when I was the recipient of a jelly jar with a bit of Schaefer beer in it and my own pickle.
Heaven.
Today, the aroma that’s rising from the soup is just steamy water. There is no matzo ball, just those plasticized vegetables from a supermarket. There’s hardly any chicken, but there’s lots of salt. The pickle is from a jar, not from the barrel at the delicatessen. No Schaefer or Rheingold, just some craft beer.
We decided we could not serve that soup, so we reached into the oven and out came two warm, homemade brownies. Upon munching, our two boys joined in unison, saying, “Thanks, Grandma. Thanks, Grandpa.”
Joel Reitman
Peconic
