Mennonite Chicken Soup -- can I cook, or what?

For the very first time in my life, I cooked the traditional Mennonite Chicken Soup on which I was raised. This soup has always been one of my favorite meals, and just the smell in the house gets my mouth to watering.

The basic recipe can be found online in a half dozen places, so this is not going to be news to anyone, but I decided to blog my first attempt at a Mennonite dish for posterity anyway ...

My mother makes a delicious version of this soup, and this is the recipe I tried. It starts with a chicken in salted water (trust me that this is a bland soup if not salted.) Boil the crap out of it for 2 1/2 to 3 hours ...


Really ... is there anything more attractive that a chicken being boiled? Not in my book.

And then add the spices for the last hour. These spices are:

A Cinnamon stick ... my mother has been making the soup for a while now without this ingredient, but it adds a little something and should be used ...


Then the parsley ... [Edit: the parsley shown here is curly-leaf ... you need flat-leaf for this soup.]


Several Bay leaves ...


Some black peppercorns in a spice holder ...


And finally, the star of this show .... literally .... Star Anise ...


Some people write how you should not make this soup of the taste of black licorice bothers you ... bollocks ... I've never tasted black licorice in this soup and I doubt that anyone else will either.

Ok ... once the spices have been in for an hour or so, you are done. The chicken has dismembered itself and the whole house smells like an old-fashioned farm house ... awesome ...


Take the chicken out ... consider the use of tongs ... and put it aside for adding to the bowls ... then you can proceed in one of several ways, strain the broth into some container or other, or leave it on the stove until it is cool enough to put away.

Of course, at some point near the end, you have started some more salted water for your egg noodles. If I were in Winnipeg, I would take a package of hand-made noodles by the Mennonite women of Plum Coulee in southern Manitoba from the freezer and cook that.

Speaking of Plum Coulee ... my family drove to Winkler about a million times in my youth ... all my favorite aunts, uncles, cousins and grandmother were out there. When we took the Pembina Highway (75), we passed through Plum Coulee ... and the joke was to never blink as you went through. I believe it is quite a bit bigger now ...



It was the last town before arriving at Winkler, the place of my birth. Obviously, an annointed place ...

But I am in Ottawa and have run fresh out of Mennonite women from which to buy the noodles. Instead I hit the local Sobeys, which seems to have stocked a pretty decent alternative.


These take only 4 minutes to cook, and they are amazing. Not kidding about that. Still firm today when I took a frozen serving out of the freezer and zapped it in the microwave. And it was as good as it was last night :-)

To serve the soup. you typically grab some bits of chicken leg or breast and put it on the bottom of the bowl ... then heap noodles into the bowl ... then add more chicken ... and finally strain the soup directly into the bowl. I simply ladle it directly from the pot.

Quick aside ... these dishes are porcelain ... they never chip, even in the dishwasher. Highly recommended.

Did you ever see a soup looking finer? Trust me that this is the modern orgasmatron ... as seen in the Woody Allen movie Sleeper ... only you don't go inside of it ... it goes inside of you ....

Hmmm ... that analogy came off a little more risque than expected .... oops ...

Variations abound on the net as well. Two changes I plan on trying .... the first is throwing the spices in for the whole cooking time. The second is adding a chopped onion to the broth .... can't wait ...