Here is what you need to know as you read how I revived a spent chicken carcass this past week. From the time I was a young child, I was taught not to waste. It was a core value of my family. My parents were young children during the Depression, and my mother grew up with her own grandmother, an immigrant, in a 3-generation household. My great-grandmother was the family cook, and this is why my mother remains the only person in my world who knows how to make chicken fricassee with chicken feet. Her grandmother, for whom I am named, wasted nothing.
Now then, this week’s adventure. Last Monday evening I discovered a chicken carcass on the second shelf of the refrigerator. It had been pretty well picked over, but there was still lots of meat on it. Unfortunately, because those were bits that just don’t have a name, everyone else was done with it. But I saw opportunity.
I picked up the carcass and dropped it into a large soup pot. I covered it barely with cold water, and added 2 tablespoons of white vinegar. I turned on the heat to just 225F, and walked away. In the morning I found a lovely chicken broth, more full-bodied than expected, and almost sweet from the slow caramelization process initiated by the slow cooking. For breakfast, along with my scrambled egg, I ladled off a couple of scoops and drank the broth. I added a little more water to the pot to replace what I had taken. The broth continued to cook.
Tuesday evening I sliced a few leaves of kale into ribbons and put them into soup bowls. Then I ladled a few scoops of the hot chicken broth over the kale, which quickly turned bright green. I also scooped out a few large chunks of chicken. With white bean and cucumber salad, a great dinner. Once again, I added water to the pot to replace what I had taken, and the broth continued to cook.
The next morning, after I drank a mug of the warm broth, I added a few small white turnips (sliced thinly), a carrot (peeled and cut into large chunks), and a potato (scrubbed and quartered). Then once again, I left. Wednesday evening I ate a big bowl of chicken soup with vegetables. It was delicious. The soup was a warm caramel color now, full of flavor and body. The bones, especially the smaller ones, were beginning to crumble, so that if I missed one in picking out the chunks of meat, it didn’t matter, because it would simply disintegrate in my mouth.
The final morning of the experiment, after having filled a to-go mug with broth, which I later drank gratefully during an early-morning meeting in what turned out to be a freezing cold room, I dumped a large amount of kale into the remaining soup and left it to cook all day. That night, when I arrived home, I scrambled an egg and poured it into the hot soup as I stirred it in a large, slow circle. Egg drop soup, the final soup of the week. If I had had some tofu I might have cut it into cubes and added that, too.
At the end of this experiment, a few large bones remained in the pot, and not much else. Almost everything else had disintegrated. I had turned a chicken carcass, rich in calcium and collagen (the protein in the bones), into half a dozen meals. The collagen was what had made the broth so rich and full-bodied.
My great-grandmother would have expected no less.
[Note: I used plain white vinegar this time. Next time I will use the chive flower vinegar I made this week, which consists simply of stuffing lavender chive flowers into a glass jar and covering them with white vinegar. The resulting pink vinegar is visually stunning, with a magnificent aroma. You can see what I mean in the photo above.]