PREPARATION
Put flanken (beef short ribs) in pot with just enough water to cover it. Boil 5 minutes or so until fat/skim comes to top for you to remove all. Set aside to cool.
Clean chicken well. All of it goes into the soup except for the liver. Cut carrots in 3-4″ pieces.
Line bottom of pot with bones, then beef, then chicken, then dill, then parsley, celery, onions, potato, turnip, and carrots. Add cold water (it is a scientific fact that cold water works best, something to do with the collagen in the bones) to cover. Bring to boil and watch so you can remove top fat constantly before covering, then let simmer/slow boil for 3 hours. Add salt and pepper to taste. This is an old Jewish chicken soup recipe, it would have called for kosher chicken, which is salted as part of the koshering process. Regular chicken will require much more salt, and I use Morton’s!
When soup is ready, strain ingredients keeping soup separate. Save carrots separately in container and then eat or discard what yo don;t want.
NEXT DAY
Once you refrigerate your soup over night, the fat will rise to the top. Remove it. Soup tastes better on the second day!
That is my Grandma Sophie’s Chicken Soup recipe, handed down several generations. It may even be her mom’s recipe, which makes it from the old country! (And the picture of the chicken has always been on the top!) The old saying that your grandma cooks with love was MORE than true, it was the best soup I ever had in my life. And all my cousins would agree. And we always had it with “lucsion,” which is superfine egg noodles. My Italian in-laws use rice. Either works, I prefer that which I have been eating for 51 years!
This recipe brings back a lot of memories of eating at my beloved grandma’s house. When she became too old to cook, my mom took on the task, but it was never the same for me. My niece and nephews love my mom’s soup because she is their grandma, they love it the way that I loved my grandma’s soup, and that is how it should be.
I now make this soup for my son. G-d willing, one day my son’s children will love the way their Grandpa Mitch makes this same chicken soup for them!
Oh Mitch, you should taste my mother soup. It tastes exactly like Grandma’s. The thing that made Grandma’s better was that those were the times when we all got together. I will cherish that for the rest of my life.
Hi Mitch,
I wanted to take a moment and let you know that this soup sounds amazing! My mouth is watering just reading the recipe. I completely agree about the old saying that “a grandma cooks with love.” My grandmother handed her Noodle Kugel recipe to me this past October and I’ve made it since, but it never tastes the way her Kugel did and I don’t know that it ever will. Still, the fond memories of helping her cook it will always be in my heart.
Thank You!!
I will have to make this! It sounds lovely! I cook with my kiddos all the time and I, too, hope they will pass on family recipes to their kids. I felt sooooo jealous the other day when I saw you guys go to a sushi-making workshop. Those are the things that make me miss living in the city!
This sounds great! I never thought of adding a turnip but I bet it’s excellent! Thanks for sharing this! I am always on the hunt for new soup recipes as soon as the frost starts to settle on everything! 🙂
Angela Michels