Butcher and recipe writer, Sarah Mann-Yeager confirms that chicken livers were cheap but were also delicate and spoiled easily. Serving them as chopped liver was a good way to use them up and provide a tasty extra course for the most important meal of the week.
Much of the traditional Friday night menu reflected a need for economy — kneidels in the soup a low-cost option, made simply with schmaltz, eggs and matzah meal or sometimes with stale ground challah or any leftover bread. Vegetables used to flavour the soup could also be served in the bowls with with egg noodles/lockshen.
Mann-Yeager suggests a good way to economise for your Friday night meal would be to choose chicken wings for soup making. You can use a carcass – which is cheaper still – but you won’t get much meat.
“Chicken wings have the perfect ratio of skin bone, collagen and gelatine to create a deeply flavoured rich broth” she says. You can see it from the way it sets to a jellied consistency when chilled.
Wings will help your budget fly Photo: Getty ImagesGetty Images
You can make an intensely chicken-y broth with wings alone (find the recipe here) but Mann-Yeager supplements hers with a few extra chicken necks or a turkey neck. If she’s making kreplach, she’ll add a slice of beef shin or a knob of bola to the pot.
The beef is a family hack to deepen and enrich the flavour. “I do it because my mum does, my grandmother did and so did her mother, the recipe has provenance we use the cooked meat to fill kreplach if we are making them.” You’ll find Mann-Yeager’s quick cheat’s kreplach recipe here.
And it’s worth making your soup a day or two ahead so you can skim off and save the shmaltz from the top of the soup for your kneidels and roast potatoes.
Something Mann-Yeager also recommends as a money-saving (and convenience) hack is to cook an entire packet of lockshen when boiling it for your soup. “Only place the noodles you want to serve in the soup, and you can then use the leftover ones to make a lockshen pudding for dessert. “It’s a quick easy fix – if the oven is already on for the chicken and potatoes the pudding can happily slide in alongside the other dishes.
Another energy-saving tip she shared is to cook your pudding in the residual heat of the oven. “I take out my chicken when roasted, replace it with the lockshen pudding (or other baked dessert) and then turn the oven off and allow it to cook in the residual heat.
And those chicken wings don’t just make a tasty soup. You should be able to strip a surprising amount of chicken from the wings. The meat may be less tasty, having given its all to the soup, but it will still be great in the soup to make it heartier. Even better, she says, you can turn it into another meal by combining it with a parev roux sauce and veggies then baking it in a pie. (Find the recipe here.)
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Mann-Yeager recommends saving the soup chicken plus about 300ml of soup to make the pie – which will work as supper later in the week.
If there isn’t enough meat from the soup for a pie you can add any roast chicken leftovers “I strip the residual meat from the roast chicken carcass and add it to the boiled wing meat. If there is insufficient for a pie, it goes in the freezer in a bag until there is. I also freeze the roasted carcass and any bits of left over skin in a large freezer bag adding to it, after a few weeks there are enough roasted chicken bones to make chicken stock that I then use as a base for gravy or a casserole/stew.
Adding extra veg will also extend your pie filling – you can mix up the veg according to what’s in season and good value.
So two family packs of chicken wings will stretch to make your Friday night soup plus a pie and the shmaltz skimmed off the chicken can be used for kneidlach and for roasting potatoes.
Louismann.co.uk
