Chicken Soup for the Mennonite Soul
A recipe from the Great Plains
In 2017, I stopped by to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to visit my high school friend Trey and his friend Floyd Hand.
I had just left my job as a food editor at the Southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun, and I was trying to decide what to do next—having bought myself some time by getting into grad school and lining up a string of freelance assignments.
All I knew for sure was that I wanted to move home to the Midwest and that I wanted to keep working with food, so I was driving across the region looking for inspiration and opportunities. Trey suggested that I ask Hand, a mentor, for his advice.
“What people need,” Hand told me, “is soup.”
I can’t quote Hand verbatim beyond that opening line. I didn’t record that conversation, unfortunately, and he passed away four years ago. As I remember, he told me that before Europeans came to the Dakotas, the Lakota subsisted on soup. Soup is healthy, traditional, and easy to make, he said—one solution to the dietary problems that plague many Native American populations and the nation as a whole. That wasn’t something I’d ever considered before, so it stuck with me.
Whether your distant ancestors lived on the Plains, like Hand’s, or in the Alps, like mine, chances are they ate soup. In 2012, archaeologists found scorched fragments of 20,000-year-old Chinese pottery that may have come from Ice Age soup bowls. Some scientists have speculated that even Neanderthals knew how to make basic broths.
Soup is the social contract in a pot—the hunter’s meat and the farmer’s (or forager’s) vegetables and grains, cut into bits, mashed or pureed, or simmered until falling apart, so that each nourishing spoonful contains a little bit of everything.
I don’t buy into the idea, usually attributed to Faulkner, that civilization begins with distillation, but I think it’s possible that society as we know it begins with soup.
Norma Jost Voth described the power of communal cooking in Mennonite Foods and Folkways, about a group of people who carried their traditions from Germany to Russia to the Great Plains, adapting them as necessary along the way.
“Whether in south Russia, the American prairies, or the Paraguayan Chaco, they formed a culture all their own,” she wrote, in the second volume. “In so doing they strengthened their identity. A distinctive way of living encircled these Mennonites, from housing styles to their own language to an educational system to the routine of their work week. Through it all ran the pleasure of eating—for necessity, of course, but also filling out all social occasions. Their food tradition flourished, and so, eventually, did they.”
I came across Voth’s book while looking for a recipe for Mennonite chicken borscht, a dish that I discovered after my own resettlement.
Last summer, I moved from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Kansas City, Missouri. To help me acclimate to the other side of the Midwest, my girlfriend, Liz—a Central Time lifer who grew up in Iowa and moved to Missouri more than a decade ago—took me on a road trip across the neighboring state of Kansas.
I don’t have much patience for people who want to carve the Midwest up into multiple regions, when the South gets the Gulf Coast and Appalachia. Indianans and North Dakotans deserve to commiserate, because we all look the same to tastemakers who can’t tell Ohio from Iowa (and sometimes, Idaho). All the region’s diverse geographies, cultures, and food traditions belong in our common stew.
That said, Kansas is a different Midwest from southern Ohio, with the long views and muted colors that distinguish the Great Plains from the Great Lakes. I didn’t recognize most of the dishes on the Mennonite buffet at The Breadbasket in Newton, Kansas, where we stopped on the first night of the road trip—not even the borscht, the restaurant’s best-selling soup, which is beet-free and beige.
That soup was rich and satisfying, though. I thought of it during the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, while I was quarantined in my Kansas City bungalow with a nasty case of covid. I craved something with chicken-soup appeal but more flavor and substance. A chicken-and-vegetable stew with a finishing dollop of sour cream sounded good.
After consulting as many Mennonite sources as I could find and trying a few test batches, I came up with this recipe, which borrows most directly from Voth’s books and from Frank Carey and Jayni Naas’s The Kansas Cookbook.
It might be what you need this week, with temperatures plunging and covid cases on the rise again. “It has been argued that anyone who eats a bowl of Mennonite Chicken Borscht will not come down with a cold or the flu throughout the winter months,” an unbylined reporter wrote in the Manhattan, Kansas, Mercury in December of 1987. “While there are no written guarantees to this claim, it certainly wouldn't hurt to try it.”
Mennonite Chicken Borscht
Makes 4 quarts, serving 8-10
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 2 hours (or slightly less)
Total time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
A few notes: First, yes, that’s a generous amount of salt. Consider that you’re seasoning a whole chicken, three to four quarts of stock, and a heap of vegetables, including potatoes, which are salt sponges. If you’re wary of salt, do what I did for the first batch: Start with half the amount listed below and add more to taste.
Second, I recommend using white pepper, which has a floral, musty, slightly fermented flavor that I love, especially in homestyle dishes like this one. (It’s culturally appropriate, too. White pepper is a common ingredient in Mennonite recipes, including other chicken borschts.)
About once a year, I order a pound of Burlap and Barrel’s full-flavored white pepper, sourced from a farmer in Indonesia who processes it the traditional way, fermenting the berries in a stream on his property and drying them in the sun. It’s one of my culinary splurges, and I think it’s worth every dollar. If you don’t want to make that investment, use the white pepper at the supermarket, or just stick to black pepper.
Third, don’t skimp on the sour cream. I started with ½ cup and found that it didn’t add enough body to justify its presence. You could add more. Whatever you do, don’t skip the tempering step, which I took from one of my favorite recipe developers, Kenji Lopez-Alt. That’s the difference between a rich, fortified broth and a pot pebbled with grainy curds.
Like many soups, this is better on day two, but when reheating it, take care not to let it come to a simmer, or the sour cream could break.
Ingredients
1 3-5-pound (1.8kg) whole chicken
1 large yellow onion (400g), quartered
1 tsp. whole white peppercorns (Substitute black peppercorns if necessary)
1 tsp. whole allspice berries
2 tbsp. Diamond Crystal kosher salt (16g), plus more to taste (For Morton’s, use half as much salt by volume, or the same weight)
1 bay leaf
1 14.5-oz. can diced tomatoes, undrained
3-4 medium Yukon gold potatoes (650g), peeled and cut into ½-inch dice
3 medium carrots (250g), peeled and cut on a slight bias into ¼-inch slices
2 medium ribs celery (150g), cut on a slight bias into ¼-inch slices
½ large head green cabbage (650g), cored and thinly sliced
1 cup sour cream (225g)
¼ cup chopped fresh parsley leaves and tender stems, from about ½ bunch (15g)
¼ cup chopped fresh dill leaves and tender stems, from about ½ bunch (15g)
Freshly ground white pepper, to taste (Substitute black pepper if necessary)
Preparation
Add chicken, onion, peppercorns, allspice, salt, and 4 quarts water (or more as needed, to cover chicken) to a large stockpot. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a moderate simmer. Cook until chicken is tender and shreds easily with a fork, about 1 hour. Remove chicken from broth. Strain broth and return it to the pot. (You should end up with about 3 quarts.) When chicken is cool, remove meat from bones and shred using your hands or two forks. Discard bones and skin.
Add canned tomatoes and juice, potatoes, carrot, celery, cabbage, and reserved shredded chicken to broth. (If you have more than about 2 quarts of meat, you may want to reserve the rest for other uses. Also, note that the cabbage will reduce substantially as it cooks, so don’t worry if the pot looks overfull.) Return soup to a vigorous simmer. Cook until vegetables are tender but not falling apart, 10-15 minutes. Remove soup from heat.
Add sour cream to a medium mixing bowl. Whisking constantly, ladle a splash of hot broth into the sour cream. Continue to whisk ladles full of soup into sour cream until mixture is warm. (Tempering the sour cream this way makes it less likely to break when added to the soup.) Whisk sour cream mixture into the soup. Stir in chopped dill and parsley. Season to taste with salt and white pepper. Serve immediately.