Romanian Chicken Soup / Supa de pui romaneasca

Directions

Choose a good, fat 4 to 5 pound chicken, clean very well and place in a large pot of cold water. (If you want to make a good soup always cook your meats in cold water, but if you want the meal lo be better, place it in boiling water.)

Bring to a boil and continue the boiling for one hour on a low fire. Now add at short intervals 3 or 4 cleaned carrots, one bunch of celery leaves and one bunch of parsley leaves, each bunch being tied together with white thread. After a few minutes remove the celery and parsley leaves.

Continue to add at short intervals one small onion, a small parsnip, a knob of celery cut in half and one parsley root. Season to taste and continue to boil for 2 to 3 hours more until the chicken is tender.

Strain from the chicken stock enough liquid into a pot to make the right amount of soup for one meal. Bring to a boil and add thin noodles or rice.

But if you add farina dumplings the soup tastes wonderfully delicious. If not done correctly, they turn out hard and that is a great disappointment.

Keep the pot containing the chicken warm until ready to serve. Serve the chicken on a heated plate with mashed potatoes, garnished with the soup vegetables, and sprinkled over with finely chopped parsley. As a side dish serve compote in small saucers.

In Romania this is a Sunday or holiday dish, and is also used when important guests are entertained. They also make the same soup for a young mother, but with a little delicious difference.

They mix the yolk of one egg and 2 to 3 tablespoonfuls of heavy sweet cream, then pour the hot soup on this mixture, stirring gently. Sometimes sour cream is substituted for the sweet cream. A little lemon juice is then added, and this results in a captivating flavor.

It is also the custom to bring nourishing soups as a gift to a new mother, so she may have good milk to feed her baby. Usually it is chicken soup, with tender chicken parts in it. Friends or neighbors are not ashamed to inquire if the new mother has already gotten the soup they mean to bring.

If this is the case, they will make changes in it, perhaps straining the soup and adding lemon juice and sour cream sauce, putting on top a few diced bread pieces toasted in butter.