smitten kitchen

My German grandmother never made mazto ball soup with chicken stock, or so my mother tells me. In fact, she never made chicken stock at all. Compared to beef stock, chicken stock’s flavor paled, she felt, so why use it?

After our central European vacation, I can see that she’s not alone. We didn’t find one restaurant in Prague or Vienna that didn’t have some version of a beef consomme soup on the menu–all extremely dark and abundantly flavorful. I found this a great relief, as soup was a wonderful way to offset the heaviness of available cuisine, and also absurdly delicious, as I never knew that simple brothy soups could be so tasty.

And you’ll have to bear with me, as I know it is probably not soup season where you are, but between New York’s rainy 55 degrees yesterday and the bad cold Alex and I have passed back and forth in the last eight days, it sure was needed here.

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A confession: In spite of my current, ongoing, seeming-like-it-will-never-ever-end condition, I don’t like traditional chicken soup. Obviously, boasting such sacrilege, I am undeserving of your sympathy. Obviously, this is why, four days in, I am still on the sofa on my second box of tissues, chugging down my 20th Brita pitcher of water, my nose as red as a rail-thin starlet at 4 a.m., the bitterness of having a SuperBowl party of one only slightly mitigated by the fact that the Giants triumph–I do not embrace everyones’ grandmother’s sworn-by home remedy.

Honestly, it’s not all chicken soup that I do not like; it’s just the stuff I can normally get. Those short noodles? I can never get them on my spoon! Those bits of chicken? Always overcooked. Those carrot specks? They’re just mush. I’ve tried X Deli’s and Y Market’s and Z Restaurant’s and they always disappoint, namely because these three ingredients were never meant to be cooked for the same amount of time, nor kept warm for hours on end, which is why I was given no choice this weekend but to take the matter into my own hand and make my favorite variety of chicken soup: matzo ball soup.

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You know, I had great plans for tonight. As promised, I was going to tell you all about the recipe that didn’t make the cut for my dumplings article on NPR. We’d talk about the history of vareniki, their texture, the process of making them and what a scandalously good meal it was when we had these apricot and walnut vareniki for dessert.

But then, well, instead I went to the opening of a friend’s new gallery and like the eternal college student I am in the face of an open bar, I had several glasses of champagne and now here we are and eloquence, as well as grammar/sentence structure/coherent story telling escape me. Sad but true.

So let me just cut to the chase of it, shall I? Alex, though technically Russian was actually born in the Ukraine, and Ukranians, you see, have their own version of dumplings, and I think they are fantastic. Varenyky (Ukrainian) or vareniki (Russian) are derived from the word varenyk, which simply means “boiled thing,” but prefer to think of them as a less-bulky cousin of Polish pierogi. While they can be filled with any number of ingredients–sauerkraut, mashed potatoes or meat–cheese and/or dessert preparations are common. When I found an old Gourmet recipe filled with apricot and walnuts, I knew I had hit home.

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Alright, although I don’t know who, someone has been holding out on me because potato pierogi are so easy to make, I feel that I should have been privy to this information earlier than Friday night.

Perhaps I should backtrack and give you some good explanation for eating Eastern European keep-you-padded-over-the-long-winter-months fare in the stickiest (or so I hope) part of the summer, but I don’t really have one–they just called to me. Plus, a recipe that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle last month suggested that the home cook use wonton wrappers instead of making dough. I had initially poo-pooed this idea–how inauthentic! This will not do!–until my trusted Russian friend, Olga informed me that at home her family made dumplings with wonton wrappers all the time. And I realized that using such a thin, light casing might make the difference between potato pierogis seemed to me the quintessential biting-cold winter dish and something you might eat with a light, crunchy slaw for a summer dinner.

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In case I haven’t broadcasted this loudly enough in the 114 entries prior to today, I tend to get a little obsessive in the kitchen when trying to find “perfect” recipes. “Perfect” is always some approximation of an ideal that got etched in my tastebuds in some other time and place — there’s salted butter caramel (Paris), bretzel rolls (a Fresh Direct discovery), frisee with poached eggs (Balthazar, 2003) and one day soon, those truffles from La Maison du Chocolat, as my wee Valentine’s Day supply has rapidly diminished. I know better than to try to go back to such a place and expect the same experiences time after time, but it doesn’t mean I can’t have warming fits of nostalgia when I find a lost flavor on my dinner plate.

Case in point today is the steamed vegetable dumplings from Ollie’s, a small chain of large Chinese restaurants up the west side of Manhattan. Growing up, I was absorbed with them and it’s (of course) my mother’s fault, as she would bring an order of them home for us after spending a day in the city, and I’d have them cold directly from the refrigerator as soon as I woke up the next day. They were perfect: dense but not too heavy, brightly flavored and full of tiny but easily-recognized ingredients — no mystery blend here!

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