Gerald Bryan - A Bag of Bones

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I am a bone collector, chicken bones that is. I don’t mean that I leap at the offer of a sack full from Freecycle, neither do I haunt Trade Me looking for treasures like an unbroken furcula of a 1955 Harland Sanders’ broiler. No, the bones I collect go to make the basis of one of the joys of winter, homemade soup.

I was given the idea by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, of River Cottage fame. He suggested collecting the chicken bones after a meal and putting them into a plastic bag in the freezer until there was enough to make a batch of chicken stock. I’d never thought of freezing them and so the potential of, say,  a pair thigh bones was lost as not being worth the effort. Instead I’d been buying chicken frames or using the carcass of the occasional roast chicken but this idea appealed to me; it would cost very little, even with free range chicken, just an onion, a carrot, some celery perhaps and some herbs from the garden and I could have stock to freeze as well as to use right away. I started some months ago and now can turn my back on the expensive commercial preparations with their chemicals and preservatives and put the real thing in my soups.

The great chef, Escoffier wrote of soup, “Soup puts the heart at ease, calms down the violence of hunger, eliminates the tension of the day…” and his apprentice, Chef Louis P. De Gouy, wrote some years later in “The Soup Book”, “Soup is cuisine’s kindest course. It breathes reassurance; it steams consolation…”

What could be more warming and comforting after a morning’s work in a windy, wintery garden or more restoring after the rush hour commute than a mug (or cup, or bowl) of hot homemade soup…thick garlicky pumpkin perhaps or a spicy tom yam gung?

Man has been making soup for as long as he has had pots to make it in and for centuries it was the daily fare of the ordinary people. It has changed a lot since then but to some it still suggests the Dickensian workhouse, invalid food or the revolting brown boil-up of leftovers that was once common on hotel menus as “soupe du jour”. How wrong they are.

During the European Renaissance soup making was considered an art and using exotic ingredients from Africa and the Orient, it was one that only the rich could enjoy. Some of the recipes though are still used, the Spanish cebollada con almendras for instance, a delicate onion soup with almonds and cinnamon was made in the 16th century for King Ferdinand or biancomangiare, an Italian soup of chicken, rice, almonds and nutmeg which once appeared on a menu written in verse by Leonardo da Vinci.

Slowly over time soup was relegated to the role of appetiser, a mere supporting act to the main course and it is only comparatively recently, as dining has become less formal that soup has come once more into its own.

In these costly times, soup need not be expensive, one of my favourites is made from chicken stock, potatoes, cabbage and garlic and I often use the waifs and strays in the vegetable drawer to make a very acceptable vegetable soup.

You don’t have to be Escoffier to make a good soup or Graeme Hart to afford one…the only limitation is the imagination of the cook and Lindsay Bareham’s A Celebration of Soup can certainly help the uninspired.

Chicken Stock

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