You Eat: my white girl search for Chinese Chicken Soup Part Two

It's pretty common parlance to say we want something so bad we can taste it. Maybe not for younger people, I have personally had way more fun saying "I am super horny for that" for anything that is very obviously non-sexual. Who knows what the youths are saying now to dramatize desire, but growing up, wanting something so much you could practically taste it was how people got their point across. 

I have wanted Bumpa's soup so badly I could practically taste it. 

It's not weird to say when the thing you want is a food, though. 

I was not ready to throw in the towel on my search for where my grandfather is from, but I was ready to move on to another phase: reckless experimentation with zero regard for legacy or tradition. 

I am a spectacularly unreliable narrator. 

Not because I'm an intentional liar, but because I am a flamboyant romantic with a penchant for prose laden, hyperbolic soliloquys instead of just bluntly fuckin' saying the damn thing I mean. See previous sentence to illustrate my point. I can get very carried away with how I romanticize memory, to both myself and to others. When I am recalling my afternoons eating soup with my grandfather, I would describe them as something like...

"The oppressive heat and humidity of Florida afternoons may not seem like the ideal setting for a lunch of belly warming hot soup. Given the climate, it may seem strange that day after staggeringly warm day, I would walk through the afternoon dampness to have congee with my grandfather. With little regard for my things, I would toss my backpack down in the yard behind their fenced in driveway and walk in their home, heading straight for the kitchen. 

Whether my grandfather was quiet because English was his second language and spoken communication was a struggle, or his deliberate silence was just a character trait, he would always break the silence I walked into after school with a loving, "you eat?" And I always nodded and smiled. Sitting at the tiny table in Bumpa and Nonni's modest kitchen, enjoying each other's company in the familiar, familial quiet that a good meal deserves, Bumpa would ladle out a double helping into our bowls, putting mine in front of me as he sat down in his seat with his own bowl. He would pat my hand and say again, "you eat". And so I would. Together with my Bumpa." 

Which like...isn't untrue, but is also some bullshit. That's not real. Reality is, I would get bussed to Western, I would walk to my grandparents, Bumpa would be like, YOU EAT? kinda loud because he was hella deaf, and he'd be fixing me a bowl before I could answer. The part about him patting my hand is true, and the familiar quiet of good food enjoyed by people who love each other is, too. But the language is unnecessary. 

So when I recount the way that I remember the soup, am I trustworthy? The smells, the way it tasted, the ingredients I think I recognize from memory. Are those real, or did some flowery bit of nostalgia inspire me to Christopher Nolan the reality of Bumpa's soup?

Who fuckin' cares. 

When I decided I wanted to make the soup and see if I could recreate it from memory, I had a discussion with Derek about how I've kind of good cook-ed myself into a corner. My memory says that Bumpa's soup was a clear broth with chunks of veg, and it was always super rice heavy (like I said, he served it congee style a good deal of the time), but I don't personally do clear broths. I know way too much about good flavor, and building a strong soup foundation. Was I going to try and be accurate to my memory, or was I going to say fuck it and do it my own way and out soup my own grandfather?

I chose the out-soup route. Of course I did. If there's one thing I like to do, it's upstage dead people. 

When Derek and I go to Costco, I almost always get the kids a Costco chicken. Honestly, you are hard pressed to beat paying 5 bucks for a big ass whole chicken that tastes and smells fuckin' AMAZING. Every time the family would finish a chicken, I would ask them to please put the carcass in a bag in the freezer for me. When I have two carcasses in a bag, it's time to make stock. As a general rule, I go for a pretty standard herbaceous stock with the usual suspects: peppercorn, garlic cloves, basil, rosemary, oregano, thyme, bay leaf, and whatever veg scraps I have on hand, usually carrot, onion, and SOMETIMES celery, though not often. I will bloom the aromatics in a tiny bit of oil for a few minutes, then I dump in my carcasses and veg scraps, and a couple gallons of water, and then I let that shit simmer until it sits right in my spirit to turn it off. Good stock. The remaining chicken falls off into the stock, the good yummies leech out from the bones, and the base flavor is roasty yumminess because the chicken is cooked by fire on a spit. It's perfection. It's more like bone broth, too. Calling it a stock doesn't quite do it justice, and calling it broth is a downright lie, but bone broth is fuckin' MEATY for a liquid. Not really like, Asian flavor in my carcass water, though. So I knew I would have to go for a different kind of base. 

mmm. Dead stuff.

Take..one?

Aha!

I knew my broth needed more punch, but I also knew that there was no fucking way that my grandfather did all of this shit making my soup. So at some point, I wonder if I should stop calling this "My Bumpa's Soup" and start admitting that I had every intention of upstaging him, and if I wanted to be true to my memory, I should have just boiled a fuckin' chicken with raw ass veg and served that shit over rice when it was done. But I mentioned earlier that the little monster that drives my brain machine is such an unrepentant wearer of rose colored glasses, so this is her love letter to what truly is a wonderful memory, even if the bare bones reality is less culinarily proficient to a Western sensibility.  

See, the filtered water is clue one that I am not staying true to the reality of this soup. My Bumpa didn't use filtered water, he used horrid, horrid, sulfur tasting Florida garbage tap water. Fetid, heinous, unforgivable. My version was not lacking in sulfur on the front or back palette. That being said, neither was Bumpa's. Truly his soup was delicious. 

We're cooking now! Simmering. Boiling. Whatever the right term is, that's what we're doing. 

I was right on. I DO  know too much about making aromatic stocks, but isn't this ALSO part of legacy? Adding your turn to whatever the recipe is? I hear people saying no in my brain, and honestly...fair. Accurate. Honest reporting. No. I should have just done it the other way. The way I think my grandfather did it. And like...I will. I have already talked to Derek about doing a side by side and seeing if Bumpa's assumed way produces a just as good or better result. Eventually. There is a time for that, but that time isn't yet. 

I let that stock simmer together for maybe an hour and a half. Enough time to get deep flavors, but not too much that I would start concentrating the stock. Here is the result, and just LOOK at that layer of fat on top:

Oh. Oh my, yes. The color! The fat! The little bits of soupy goodie floaties! I've only really heard unctuous used as a pejorative until the last year or so, which is funny, because I think it sounds like such a positive word. I don't know if the positive spin on it has caught on en masse, but if it has, that shit looks unctuous. If it hasn't, it looks something not unctuous. 

Is that a clear broth? Eagle eyed readers may note that it is rather on the opaque side of the clear spectrum. Well. Sorry, Bumpa, but you're welcome to my flamboyant writer's brain!

Let's take a moment to see what my live in critic thinks:

More salt. Harrumph. 

Harrumph but fair. I hadn't salted the stock at all, as I was relying on each eater to salt their own dish. I mention in the video that Bumpa and I would eat it with our own sesame oil and soy sauce, but...I am questioning that memory in this moment. Thinking very hard, I think all that was ever on the table in the kitchen for seasoning was salt. I really am a fucking unreliable narrator. Jesus. Well. I still think each eater should salt their own dish, whether or not there was soy sauce and sesame oil on the table, and whether or not we used them together. I'm not your maid. 

But we have a delicious, delicious winner for the stock, so I think we call that done! Time for the more tedious part of the soup recreation:

Taking out all of the bones and aromatics, and jarring up the excess...

Are you a person who thinks this looks gorgeous, or are you a person who is wrong?

..and now that everything was separated from the broth and the extra was canned, it was time to shred the chicken from the bones...

And then put in the veg. I do think that I was right, that Bumpa's soup was a two phase process. Not as extra as all of the shit I was doing, but not just chucking some raw chicken in with some raw veg and calling it good after twenty minutes of boiling. I think the middle of that and my over the top method is where Bumpa's soup actually lives. 

And that was it. I did it. I spent an afternoon just...trying it out, and I did something that...while perhaps not identical to what Bumpa made for me every afternoon three decades ago...related enough that my quest for his soup feels complete. 

And honestly, my take away from this?

My take away is what the actual fuck. Because here's where we're at:

Number one, and perhaps most important: I have had the skills to make this soup for literally a decade plus and I've just been sleeping on the idea that it was just...just a fuckin' chicken soup with an aromatic base that is considered Asian. I could have had this years and years and years ago. I don't know if it's regular ol' racism that made my memory exoticize the simplicity of this dish, or if it was my enduring fondness of my Bumpa that wanted the reality of the dish to be more complicated so I could further lionize the man I grew up with as my only grandfather on my father's side. Maybe the truth is in the middle, maybe it's nowhere close to either, but for sure this is just a really good chicken soup. I hunted for something so simple and I honestly did not fucking have to. And if that isn't 75% of my entire lifespan, I don't know what is;

Dos: I am on a real hunt for my grandfather's life now. The soup was a gateway into a mystery that is so much bigger than the me chasing that taste for years and years could have ever dreamed.

Over the last several months, I have been trying to understand what life events my grandfather lived through. I always knew him as quiet, deliberate, and kind...I stepped on one of his cockatiels when I was a little girl. I killed it. It was entirely unintentional, but I remember my grandfather picking it up from the hallway and carrying it outside. I followed him, crying and apologizing, and thinking he was going to yell at me...yell at me, then bury his pet. He did neither thing. He threw it in the trash can and walked back inside, giving me a little shoulder pat on his way in. He didn't say another word about it. I was too little to wonder what kind of life makes someone that pragmatic or detached. But I wonder now. And it doesn't seem like my family has a lot of answers for me, and without the least bit of judgment, the answers they HAVE had for me and largely incorrect. So I set about finding them myself.