Jewish and Cantonese partners come to a cultural understanding via
chicken foot soup

Submitted by carriebella
email address: carriecostello@hotmail.com

So here's a culturally iconic story: the one about the grandmother and the chicken soup. My mysah goes like this: my grandmother used to make her chicken soup using chicken feet. My father, her son-in-law, thought it was disgusting, seeing the scaley feet with their bulbous toes rolling around in the pot, and he wouldn't eat it. He use to laugh and laugh at my grandmother and great-grandmother and their peasant food. My great-grandmother loved to eat stale bread soaked in watered milk. Now, as my father rightly pointed out, when you are a peasant living in Russia or Sicily, you have to make do with what you can scrounge, and eating chicken feet and stale bread crusts is understandable. But we were living in middle class America, and not only were chicken feet and stale crusts unnecessary, they were hard to come by. My grandmother had to go to a butcher instead of the grocery store to get her chicken feet, and my great-grandmother had to leave bread out especially to get stale, shooing the rest of the family away when we tried to eat it, or later, throw it in the trash.

My mother made chicken foot soup twice that I can recall. She felt guilty about preparing somethiing so outlandish, something my father would never eat--but secretly, she loved it. Sucking the soft pads off the well-cooked toes (something my father would gag at if he caught her), my mother tasted her childhood, comfort, and home.

Now we fast forward to my adulthood and my kitchen. My spouse isn't Jewish, he's Asian. Nobody had a real problem with the match. My father, the electrical engineer with a whole eugenic heirarchy fixed in his brain, approves of Asians, whom he believes to be naturally intelligent and mathimatically-inclined, and hence likely to produce superior offspring (I kid you not). My mother-in-law similarly approved of Jews as being intellectual and literate as a race, and hence likely to produce interesting offspring (no joke again). Everyone was happy.

Still, my spouse was use to his mother's cooking. Not that he minded my cooking, really. In fact, when I would make American classics like meatloaf with mashed potatoes, or hamburgers with home fries, or peanot butter and jelly on white bread, he was exstatic. (His mother's cooking did incorporate some Western elements--mostly French--but only if they were healthy and balanced and low-fat. Like many Chinese people, she looks at food as both art and medicine. No hot dogs in her house.) So my spouse did loved it when I would make the unhealthy, meaty, fatty foods he had always longed for as a boy growing up in America, but which his mother prohibited. Yes, he loved my goyische cooking. But he found my Jewish cooking weird. Matzo balls were a puzzle to him; gefilte fish were disgusting; noodle kugel was too sweet to be a side dish but not interesting enough for a dessert; meat tzimmes was bizarre. Not that he disliked Jewish foods I HADN'T cooked. He spent childhood ye! ars in New York and Miami, after all... He understood bagels with cream cheese and lox, or a bright yellow potato knish. Nope, it was my home-cooked Jewish meals he picked at apologetically.

One day, I made chicken foot soup.

I love making soups, and I think I'm pretty good at it. But my soups were too thick and rich to be easily accepted by a man raised to think of chicken soup as a clear broth with some watercress floating in it. I therefore made the chicken foot soup for myself. I assumed my partner in life would run from the room if he saw me, as my father ran from my mother when she sucked chicken feet. Imagine my suprise then, when my spouse came into the kitchen, saw the feet in the pot, and proceeded to glow. "Chicken feet! I've never seen them outside of a Chinese restaurant!"

I expressed my suprise to my spouse at his appreciation, and he explained. It seemed that eating chicken feet instilled in him a sense of Cantonese pride, with warm recollections of the peasant food reviled by ignorant Westerners who were unaware that the simple can often be the sublime.

We communed as we came to a shared cultural understanding, and looked fondly into one another's eyes as we slurped chicken foot soup and nibbled the tender chicken toes.

Chicken Foot Soup:
A Simple and Imprecise Recipe

Really, the best was to start is with a leftover chicken carcass. If you are removed enough from you peasant roots to find this disgusting, substitute a few nicely baked chicken legs.

Boil the carcass or legs in a potful of water with a halved onion, a couple of garlic cloves, and some black pepper and salt (or a bullion cube) for an hour and a half or so. (You can add other spices such as tarragon or sage if you want to gussy things up, but Grandma never did. . .)

Remove the chicken carcass or legs to a plate and allow to cool. Meanwhile, add 8 or 10 chicken legs to the stock and continue to boil.

When the carcass or legs are cool, remove the meat from the bones, mince, and add to the soup.

When the legs have been in the stock for about 45 minutes, add some finely sliced carrot and celery. (If you have other vegetables you feel would enhance things, add them too.)

After another 20 minutes or so, check the feet to see if they are sufficiently tender, which they probably are.

Serve hot with a foot or two sticking amusingly out of each bowl.