Moms Matzo ball Soup
“All the wise women who came before me taught me how to make matzo balls. No men taught me how to make this.” My mom slings out the word ‘men’ as if the word tastes bitter.
My mom then flashes me – her only son – a smile of impish pugnacity. She was both letting me in on the joke and daring me to challenge her. Laugh. I dare you not to. Some people joke about becoming their mother, but I’ve fully surrendered to my fate.
My mom, who came of age in the Gloria Steinem era of feminism, definitely has a warranted guilty-before-proven-innocent view on men in general. Sometimes my dad and I get a pass. Sometimes.
When I entered her kitchen that evening, she raised an eyebrow and a finger at me, “Don’t make me look crazy. Okay? I’m not some nut you are interviewing for your magazine. I’m your mother.”
Most of the nuts I’ve interviewed, we’ve met in a neutral place. A field, a public strip of beach, but on this night, I’m in my mom’s kitchen– her refuge, her laboratory, and heart. In my mom’s house food is love and love is food.
And in her own kitchen, she’s on tonight—fully in her element; waving her hands over sumptuously simmering sauce pots filled with chicken carcasses, red onions with skins still on, aromatic bouquet garni, all rising to the surface and bubbling over a classic mirepoix. I can tell she’s excited that I asked to cook with her. As a kid, stepping into her kitchen to help her cook sometimes felt like stepping into an arena. But when I did get up the courage to enter my mom’s kitchen, I would learn more about cooking in twenty minutes than I would in two years cooking on my own.
My mom started her cooking career working the line at a greasy spoon on Smith Street in the late 70s, making blue plate specials for guys sauntering in from the drunk tank at Central Bookings up on Atlantic. She cooked her way up. Eventually, she owned her own restaurant in the West Village. Her culinary accolades are immortalized in the New York Times Cooking website; just search, “Miranda Magagnini”.
My mom relishes telling the stories of her chefing days, when she rubbed shoulders with Julia Child and Marcella Hazan, who were the patron saints in the kitchen of my childhood. But my mom couldn’t stand the confines of the sweaty, windowless restaurant kitchens. She prefers to stun her guests and nourish her loved ones on her home turf. And one of her greatest hits, served every winter with a little parmigiano reggiano, is her matzo ball soup—
“Enough of that Fellini,” my mom waves a hand in front of my iPhone camera, zooming in on a pan of caramelizing onions.
My mom nudges me over to a sauce pot, thick with chicken stock filmed over with fat, and a cast iron with clumps of chicken skin glistening as they sizzle.
“I’m going to teach you how to make your own schmaltz. You render down the chicken fat, to mix into the matzo balls. What’s left here—” my mom points out the chicken skin, “Are what are called the grebners.”
Grebner is what my mom called me when I’d come home covered in dirt from little league, back when the Parade Grounds were all dirt baseball fields, instead of the anodyne astroturf they are today.
“Grebners are essential to schmaltz. And good schmaltz – now, that’s hard to come by. If you’re making, you know, something vegetarian, you can use olive oil or jarred duck fat.”
“Did your mom make matzo ball soup?”
My mom takes a beat. A slight change passes over her features – but she bounces back quickly, “You know who loved matzo ball soup? Your nonno. To him it was just like tortellini en brodo.”
My mom’s mom, nonna Jesse, renounced her Judaism after the Holocaust. Jesse was a great artist and an unprecedented autodidact. She was the valedictorian of Brooklyn College class of 1980 at the age of sixty. Despite her talents, my nonna was not an easy going, light-hearted person.
“The only day of the year my mother would remind us we were Jewish was on Christmas. We would sit around with our presents and she would call my father a hypocrite and yell, ‘what are you doing? You’re all Jewish.’ ”
“She wouldn’t talk about Judaism any other day of the year?”
“Whenever I asked her anything about herself, she would always say, ‘what’s it to you?’”
New York City is the biggest collection of villages in the world. My mom looked to the other jewish women in her village for matzo ball guidance. Carol Reich, up on Pierrepont taught my mom how to form the perfect sized matzo balls, “She would take a melon scooper. She liked them a little on the small side. But you have to account for the fact that they expand in the broth.”
Priscilla Neisch over on Pacific taught my mom how to perfect the sauteed onion and how to roll a joint. She passed away in her late middle age of cancer, and my mom has always said she left the world too soon. When my mom makes a truly special dish that has taken considerable effort, she places the food into the handmade ceramic bowls Priscilla made her.
Selma Fink on Remsen was the Queen of fresh dill and “Anne Estern, Tori’s Mom, couldn’t cook to save her life. But she had a great pie crust recipe. The secret was the ginger.”
Three days before we made matzo ball soup, my mom gave me a call. “I’ve been to three supermarkets. No matzo meal. They keep pushing this matzo mix business. I don’t buy it.”
I offered to pick up some at a kosher supermarket near my apartment. I walked past women in ankle length dresses and wigs. They cast their eyes down onto the pavement as I walked down Kingston Avenue. I thought about the unspoken reason why my grandmother was so tight-lipped about her Judaism; my great-grandmother had been a child bride and had raised four children, alone, on a factory workers’ salary. These days, people treat Barney Greengrass and Katz’s like ancient temples filled with holy relics and Adam Sandler and Larry David as cultural doyens – but there was nothing glamorous or funny about my grandmothers’ Judaism. There was only sadness and poverty.
My mom lit up when I brought home the boxes of matzo meal, “Oh, these are big boxes. Well done.”
My mom shows me how she creates her consomme with her chicken broth. The curdled fat magically comes to the surface, leaving a pure, near-amber colored broth below.
“Sometimes, just to elevate the salt, if I haven’t had enough time to let the chicken stock cook, I throw in what my nonna Chiara called a dado, a bullion cube.”
My mom’s matzo ball soup has to look as good as it tastes. “I can’t stand cloudy matzo ball soup. People think matzo balls are just big gray lumps. Ick. I like light, airy, matzo balls that float in a nice clear broth.”
With the broth ready to go, we rendered the schmaltz, pouring the fat that had wicked off the clumps of frying chicken fat into the pan. It was time to make the balls.
Aside from the schmaltz, here are some secrets to my mom’s matzo balls:
First things first, refrigerate your matzo balls overnight to really get the moisture to evaporate so they don’t fall apart when they’re poached before being added to the broth.
“It’s a two day dish. Like a good bolognese, all the ingredients need to rest and meld overnight. You’re rushing this whole thing, I know you wanted to do it tonight for the article, but that’s okay.” My mom throws up a hand, flecks of the matzo ball sticking to her splayed fingers.
Bicarbonate soda must be used when forming the balls.
“Not seltzer! That’s an old urban legend. It’s the bicarbonate in club soda that makes a matzo fluffy and float.”
Curry powder—
“It gives flavor and a beautiful yellow color. You don’t want the matzo balls to taste ick. You want them to taste good.”
Diced caramelized onions, low and slow—
“They have to be golden. You have to bring the sugar out, otherwise Priscilla will roll over in her grave.”
As I watch my mother ladle each raw matzo ball into her clear broth, each ball bobbing up to the surface with near buoyancy, I think about how many hands this matzo ball passed through. Did Carol Reich’s mother teach her how to perfect the size of the matzo ball? Who taught Priscilla the art of the sautee? Did Selma Fink’s mother send her out for the good matzo meal?
With a generous handful of fresh chopped dill, my mom begins to spoon out the soup into deruta bowls – this is an jewish-italian matzo ball soup, from nonna Chiara’s bouillon right down to the dishware.
“How many matzo balls should each of us get?”
“Four.” I offer.
My mom shakes her head, wrong answer. “Three. With four it’s too crowded.”
My dad came home from work and I set the table for three, which felt strangely empty, knowing how many family feasts we’ve had around that big wooden dining room table. My parents are fully empty nesters now, and I’m sure every meal they have together is just as wistful.
My mom scrutinizes her matzo balls, “Not enough salt. Not enough depth of flavor in the stock. This is really an overnight dish. Doing it all at once because you brought over the matzo meal is not how it’s done.”
I place a hand on my mom’s forearm, “Mom, it tastes delicious. Thank you.”
The mood lightens and I chat freely with my parents. It’s not often we have dinner together, and conversation comes easy.
Later in the dinner, my mom smiled at me and said, “You know it was your nonna Jesse that made you, your first soup.”
“Oh yeah?”
“It was a black bean soup, with a dollop of sour cream right in the center. You loved it.”
Mom’s Matzo Ball Soup Recipe
Matzo Balls – Serves 4 People
Ingredients:
4 Large Eggs
2 Tbsp of minced caramelized onions (one small onion raw)
¼ Cup of chicken fat rendered or schmaltz or olive oil
1/4 Cup of Club Soda or
¼ Cup of Seltzer and add ½ tsp baking soda to dry mix
1 tsp kosher salt
Several grinds of fresh black pepper
1 tsp yellow curry powder
1 tsp minced fresh dill
3-4 Quarts of chicken stock homemade
2 carrots – peeled and thinly sliced
2 celery ribs – trimmed and diced
Fresh dill - minced for garnish
1 generous cup of Matzo Meal
1 tsp of baking powder
Note:
Before you begin, please make sure you have all your ingredients. Also do not use Matzoh Ball Soup Mix but real matzo meal. Get it before the holidays hit as they sell out.
Mince half an onion and saute in a pan with olive oil until golden – just turning brown not dark brown. Slow and low 10 minutes or so
In a medium saucepan render chicken fat – from fat and skins saved. Add about ½ cup of water to the pan. You will need about ¾ of a pound of skin and fat to make the ¼ cup. Bring to a boil and then lower to medium-low. Keep stirring occasionally, adding more water as necessary. This process can take 45 minutes to an hour or more – so this in advance and refrigerate schmaltz for use. You can substitute duck fat or olive oil.
In a large mixing bowl, combine eggs with club soda, schmaltz, caramelized onion, minced dill. In a small bowl, stir together matzo meal with baking powder (if using), salt, black pepper and curry powder. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and stir to combine thoroughly. But do not over mix. Refrigerate uncovered for at least an hour – or overnight.
Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add a tsp of kosher salt.
Using wet hands – form matzo balls into small – 1 inch to 1 ½ inch size balls. You will need to rewet your hands to keep the mixture from sticking. Drop the balls into the boiling water and reduce heat to a strong simmer. Do not boil rapidly or balls will come apart. Once all the balls are in, cook for 30 minutes more. Then turn off the heat.
Bring your stock to a simmer. Add diced carrots and celery and cook for 10 minutes or until tender.
Using wet hands, and re-wetting hands as necessary, form matzo-ball mixture into 1- to 1 1/2-inch balls, and add to a simmering pot of stock that doesn't have the carrots and celery.
Using a slotted spoon, transfer matzo balls to serving bowls (you should have at least 3 per bowl); Ladle hot clear broth with carrots and celery into each bowl and garnish with minced dill and a grind of fresh black pepper. Serve.
Clear Chicken Broth or Rich Stock for Soup
Clear chicken broth or stock is not always the same.
When I want a rich chicken stock, I brown the vegetables and roast the chicken in the oven first. Then the method is the same --- add ingredients to a big stock pot at least 8 quarts (10-12 better) – I prefer that it is 2/3rds full of water. Add a bouquet garni. I add fresh ginger, black peppercorns, whole cloves, cardamon, thyme, bay leaf and parsley..dill stems ets. Then simmer for 2-3 hours, adding more water as necessary. Do skim scum from top and dispose.
But for clear chicken broth, we fill the pot 2/3rds of the way with water. I add washed fresh chicken, or 8 pieces, cover and bring to a. boil, uncover and have a low boil – then skim all the scum with a wide large spoon. Dispose of all scum – broth will be clear. Add vegetables at the start if you like - onion, carrot, celery etc.
Ingredients:
Rich broth - cloudy
1 chicken – preferably organic or pasture raised
Cleaned thoroughly inside and out
T Tbsp of Olive oil to coat pan
2 carrots - medium large
4 celery ribs
1 onion – medium or medium large – cut in half
1 leek washed if you have it – cut up
4 garlic cloves smashed
Bouquet garni or just throw in pot
2 bay leaves
14 Peppercorns of 16 if its Hanukkah
6/8 cardamom pods
6/8 whole cloves
2 star anise --- optional
1 knob ginger 1 inch sliced up
Bunch fresh thyme – you may want to tie this up
1 bunch parsley
Dill stems from matzo ball soup recipe
Preheat oven to 375:
Place oil in large baking dish or cookie sheet or Large baking sheet or pan --- add chicken parts or cut up chicken into parts -- add vegetables – onion face side down. Roast for 45 minutes until brown.
Scrape it all into your BIG pot that is 2/3rds full of water and bring to a boil. Get all the bits from the pan! Boil and then simmer for 2 hours. Strain, cool, refrigerate…etc.
Dante is an editor at Digest magazine, he have been know to align with his Jewish roots in the winter and Italian in the summer.