Wellness Wednesday: Bone Broth Based Soups

Jean-Marc Laroche
Lovers from the Hereafter
The Museum of Sex, New York

When I think about bones, I think about many things, some of them very tongue in cheek while others are very sentimental. When my mind wanders out of the primal gutter, I am often reminiscing over every detail of the sumptuous meals that have been centered around some delicious bird or beefy beast. The bones are veritable trophies that are left after feasting has picked them clean. When I was growing up, bones were always on the stove or roasting in the oven for the various broths my grandmother was concocting.

A product of the great depression, my grandmother was the thriftiest, most elegant woman I ever met. “Never throw anything away until you have exhausted its’ potential for something else,” she’d always remind me with a smile that curled at the last second as her blue green eyes shone with a twinkle I’ve never seen in another. My grandmother was always poor, but you’d never know it. She dressed her 4 foot 11-inch frame in perfectly tailored garments that she would buy at the thrift store and have my grandfather, who was a tailor, trim to fit her petite frame, making her look like a million bucks, even though her entire outfit cost no more than $10.00. She made her own aprons and she curled her own hair. She worked two jobs and she was the mother to four children, my mother being the oldest. So whenever she said, “never throw anything away until you have exhausted its’ potential,” I never brushed her off. I always pulled my chair up to the counter and gazed over the side of the bowl to see what she was talking about. In this case, she was picking every last morsel of meat from a chicken she had roasted the night before for dinner, in preparation for the broth. To my utter amazement, there was never a single piece of flesh left on that naked little carcass and I’ve never been able to match her precision in plucking poultry meat.

“K.K (my nickname when I was little)–now look here, once the bird is picked clean, for the very best broth, just remember, it’s all about the bones, not the meat. The bones have a secret inside that keep you strong. And you know to never taint a secret.”

“But what if I can’t get all the meat off, will I ruin the secret,” I’d ask, genuinely worried?
“Oh no, sweetie, but do your best to get as much of the meat off as you can.”
I nodded my head, but I was still uncertain of what she meant.

Then, in a simple flurry hands, she would toss a small bouquet garni of herbs, twilled with twine, 10 peppercorns, a quartered onion, the tops of three celery stalks, a biggish carrot, with the skin still on, and then the bones into a huge pot. She’d cover all the ingredients with water and set the pot over the lowest setting on her little gas stove; then, just before she turned to walk away, she’d toss in what looked like a small handful of sea salt.

“This is where we learn about the secret of bones,” she’d grin, “but you want to release it nice and slow for the best flavor.”

After a couple of hours of slow roasting, my grandmother would point into the pot saying, “look, K.K., and tell me what you see.” I stared at the the broth at what looked like floating orbs of liquid gold and asked her how she got all that gold out of a chicken. She threw her head back and laughed, “I just showed you!”

This was the core of my relationship with my grandmother. It was all about food as magic and even then, young as I was, I never wanted the magic to stop, so I never pushed her for a bigger explanation. Now, at the ripe old age of 33, I find myself wishing, deep in my bones, that I had mined her highly experienced mind for that succinct and all knowing answer. Then, in her passing, her wisdom, as if by osmosis, was passed into my bones as I lay my living hand atop hers and said good bye. Cooked low and slow, this is the secret that I witnessed, but was unable to name all those years ago, made flesh with the help of Blackbird Bakery’s wellness expert, Laura Farb.

“Bone broth is perhaps the most nutritive, inexpensive meal for the human body. The minerals in bones, when slowly cooked in water, release not just the nectar like fat of the marrow, which contain all the building blocks of life–amino acids, proteins and unsaturated fats, along with easily absorbed minerals like calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and other trace minerals including glucosamine and chondroiton, which help the crippling pains associated with arthritis and joint pain,” Laura said over a cup of coffee at Caffe Medici.

Ever since I was in college, I have ritualistically made a batch of bone based broth every Sunday. Because I like to adjust the seasonings depending on the bones, I always label each container before freezing it. Back then, I’d have months where I couldn’t even afford to heat my one room apartment, so that bone based broth has been one of my greatest emotional comforts, and still is.

Another added bonus? Well prepared broths often thicken up and congeal after they have been strained and cooled. This is because of the high levels of gelatin, which a fabulous supplementary protein. Gelatin is one of the few proteins that help lubricate the connective tissues, and boost fingernail and hair growth.

“So if you want to kick-start a healthy cleanse or to eliminate a solid food a day, replace it with a healing bowl of bone broth based soup,” Laura suggested. Your gluten free body will thank you for it and maybe, just maybe, you will feel the magic.