Jewish Chicken Recipes | Food

Date Published:: 10/01/2008

Hannah Forbes Black looks to her family for tips on the quintessential Jewish chicken dishes from (almost) one bird

There are Jews and there are Jews. My family is in the second category. Harried by pogroms, Germans, ineptitude and cold weather, we gave up the practice of religion two generations ago. Shabbat dinners have long been a thing of the past, and instead of studying Hebrew in preparation for my bat mitzvah I spent my early adolescence obsessing over the cast of Beverley Hills 90210 (not at all Jewish) and making my mother sick with worry (very Jewish). So, faced with the task of cooking chicken in three ways according to Jewish tradition, I had to call my grandfather.

My grandfather on Jewish chicken: "I don’t know what you mean by Jewish chicken recipes. Just get a chicken and roast it. You don’t need a recipe. As long as you’ve got a Jewish chicken, but they’re harder to get hold of these days. They get all mixed up in the battery farms. Maybe some of them have special ghettos for the Jewish chickens, but I’m not sure."

I’m disheartened. The phone rings. It’s my mother. (Frequent phone contact with your mother is quintessentially Jewish.) She’s worried about Britney Spears, who was recently hospitalised under mysterious circumstances. I explain that, while my concern for Britney Spears fills almost every waking moment, I am currently preoccupied by Jewish chicken recipes. She suggests calling my great-uncle Mike.

My great-uncle Mike on Jewish chicken: "What my mother used to do was first of all boil the chicken and that would make soup. You get a stock to which you can add noodles and sliced-up carrots and all that – that leaves you with the chicken, which by then is very tasteless, but she used to serve it with vegetables. But you need to make three meals, don’t you? Hmm. After you’ve consumed it, you’d have to regurgitate it to make another meal."

Mike remembers my great-grandmother cooking something called helzel, which turns out to be stuffed chicken neck. "I never used to eat it. Too fatty. My father used to like it." We decide that, if I’m going to do something with chicken offal, I should go for chopped liver (impeccably Jewish).

To the supermarket, in search of a suitable-looking chicken. Sainsbury's (Jewish-ish – try Tesco or M&S for a more Jewish supermarket) seem to sell only disembowelled chickens, their labels proudly advertising 'without giblets'. It’s not the same level of poultry as the chicken you’d get at the kosher butcher’s in 1930s Manchester ("it was all free range then", says Mike), but never mind. I cheat and buy chicken livers separately.

My mother calls again (this is extremely Jewish). Britney Spears (not Jewish) is on suicide watch. What’s my mother’s opinion of Jewish chicken cookery? "My mum used to make chopped liver with egg and grated onion. She’d fry it and mash it all together. She had a special pan she used to put all the liver in. I remember watching the scum come off the liver and thinking 'yuck', but it tasted nice. I used to like the neck – it was in the gravy, I’d feel lucky if I got the neck in the gravy." When you ask a Jewish person about cooking, they inevitably talk about their mother – even if they are your mother.