How to eat chicken Soup?

Bits. It should have bits in it. This broth should be dense, with visible pieces of chicken, vegetables, pulses and pasta. You may not be able to stand your spoon in it, but your spoon should definitely encounter some firm resistance. That heft, that ruggedness is central to this soup’s ability to banish the blues – both in the solidity and safety it suggests, and in the textural and flavour variation it provides in each mouthful. You need to chew here. Think of it as rewarding work. Eating chicken soup should feel like you are taking on a hot, generously filling fuel, laying down essential fat and protein for the cruel winter ahead (hence a gelatinous bone-broth base, speckled with globules of fat, is preferable).

Chicken soup should never be smooth. Cream of chicken soup, that pallid, sweet concoction – that looks more like a milkshake and in which the chicken meat has invariably gone AWOL – is utterly childish. It may sound more sophisticated, but chicken soup given the velouté treatment is similarly vapid. A velouté might be a smart way to showcase a single vegetable (say, Jerusalem artichoke), but its silky mouthfeel is jarring in a context where you want body, chunks, meat. Similarly, there is something eerie about clear chicken consommés. That is an awful lot of cheffy work for a soup that will leave any right-thinking diner asking: where’s the rest of it? It is as if someone has stolen, if not chicken soup’s soul, then its crown jewels.

Method of delivery
Soup served in a cup will always, as Danny Dyer might put it, leave you feeling mugged off. The idea that all soups should be blended into a smoothly drinkablehttps://acalivechurch.org/ texture is infantile, and there is something about hurriedly slurping down gulps of warm, viscous savoury liquid (in contrast to the way a spoon moderates the pace of consumption) that is actively nauseating.

Ideally, chicken soup should be served in a wide, deep bowl and consumed with a round soup spoon (using an oval dessert spoon, on the basis that it is more elegant, is a real Hyacinth Bucket move). Such a bowl retains its heat, acts as a reassuring visual representation of how thoroughly your hunger will be sated and gives you plenty of space to root around.

According to this historic – and hopefully satirical – piece from the Guardian from way back in [blows dust off file] 2002, etiquette dictates that you should only ever fill your spoon to 75% of its capacity, sip only from its sides and never bang it against the bowl. It is a set of rules that threatens to suck all the joy from what should be the most informal of dishes. This is chicken soup. It is proper tie-off, elbows-on-the-table, dig-in troughing. No airs. No graces.