Sunday Story: Good Bones
No recipe today. Instead, a story about chicken stock and teenage attitude.
Save the bones. Always save the bones.
For as long as I can remember, the remains of a chicken dinner found new life in Mom’s stockpot. She took an entirely utilitarian approach to the process. There was no artistry. Just edible frugality.
Unless the vegetables were past their prime, no sliced onions or chopped carrots made their way to the pot. No diced celery or green peppers. She would add the drippings if she hadn’t made gravy. At its essence, her stock was a few bay leaves and a well-picked-over carcass submerged in tap water. With or without drippings, the stock went on in the morning and simmered away, unattended, until she needed the stove for dinner.
Sometimes the stock was rich and gelatinous. Sometimes it was little more than chicken water. Results were irrelevant. What mattered was the thrift. “No sense in letting a perfectly good carcass go to waste,” Mom would say, placing the stripped former-chicken into the pot.
When the stock was done, Mom could toss the depleted carcass into the garbage, knowing she had wrung every ounce of nutrition and flavour out of that bird. And it would find new life in soups and stews.
It could just be my imagination, but I swear as she disposed of the bones she would slam the lid on the bin and say, “Thank you for your service!”
Once cooled, Mom poured the stock into recycled yogurt or ice cream containers. She labelled them with strips of masking tape before stacking them in the freezer. Eventually, orphaned labels littered the freezer floor. It was anyone’s guess at what was now inside the tub that once held Vanilla Yogurt.
As a teen, I was mortified by this whole process. Why can’t she use real Tupperware like everyone else? Why can’t she buy tinned soup? Why were people raised during The Depression so weird? None of my friends’ moms made stock. At least that’s what I told myself. I was too afraid to ask them for fear they would roll their eyes and label me. Unlike my mom’s masking tape, teenage labels stick for life.
Yet on cold winter days, I gladly slurped bowls of the red lentil soup she made with her stash of Embarrassment Stock. I asked for seconds when she made zucchini bisque, and the only way she could get me to eat squash was in the form of soup. Soup made from the bones of the Bird of Resentment. I was a culinary hypocrite.
Today, I am a soup fanatic, thanks in no small part to my mother and her endless cycle of roast chicken and stock. And like most hypocrites, I am more guilty than the one I accuse. I don’t merely save the bones; I create them. I butterfly whole birds just so I can use the backs for stock.
Onion nubs, carrot tops, and celery leaves go into the freezer in a bag marked “for stock.” No masking tape for me. Every bag is labelled with a Sharpie® — name and date. When it comes time to make stock, I pull out the bones and reserved vegetables and use only reverse osmosis water. The brew simmers overnight and is finished in the morning with a bouquet garni. It’s dark and rich, and once chilled is thick as pudding.
And when I have my parents over for Sunday dinner, I serve them dishes made with my homemade stock: Thick lentil soup kissed with cumin and lemon for lunch, or a hearty chicken pot pie topped with a homemade crust. We eat and talk and laugh. After dinner, the leftovers go home with them — in real Tupperware. There’s no need for labels. They can see what’s inside and will enjoy the contents for lunch the next day.
The only piece missing from the cycle is embarrassment. That is long gone. It’s been replaced with appreciation. And joy.
Mom, thank you for your service.