Recipes

This is the soup I cooked alongside an Egyptian friend all those years ago, or at least this is how I remember it. It often includes potatoes but I didn't want to murk up the broth, nor did I want to fill everyone up early on in the dinner. Neither did I want to follow the traditional way of serving it by which the clear soup would be ladled out first, with the meatballs and vegetables to be eaten as a main course after.

This makes a soup that doesn't stop anyone enjoying the roast meat later, and saves you having to cook huge quantities. It takes a long time, admittedly, and I'm sure it's perfectly possible to find good "fresh" stock in tubs in the shops that could replace the slow boiling up of bones, but I wouldn't want to do that. I like the gradual build-up, as well as the feeling that I've made it all, and it's not as if it is actually difficult.

Chicken wings are one of the best (and least expensive) ways of making chicken soup. The roasting birds that you buy even in good butchers just don't provide as much flavor, or anywhere near, pound for pound. The meatballs are what turn this soup into a truly festive offering but the fava beans are a significant addition, too, if an almost equally fiddly one: it's not just that they represent spring, which they do, but also that they are known to have been eaten by the Hebrew slaves in Egypt.

For the soup base:
4½ lbs chicken wings
2 bay leaves
2 leeks, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon turmeric
2 carrots, roughly chopped
1 tablespoon dried mint
1 onion, halved
1 teaspoon ground coriander
2 sticks of celery, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
zest and juice of 2 lemons
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
handful parsley
16 cups water
2 tablespoons sea salt/1 tablespoon table salt

Put everything into a large saucepan, a very large saucepan, and bring to the boil. Then turn down the heat—skimming off any scum as you do so—and simmer gently for about 4 hours, partially covered. When it has cooled, strain the soup through muslin to make about 10 cups. When the soup's cold, put it in the fridge overnight; the next day it will be easy to scrape off all the fat which will have risen to the top and solidified.

For the meatballs:
1 matzoh sheet, soaked in 1 cup water for 10 minutes, then wrung out
zest of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon sea salt/1½ teaspoons table salt
14oz (2) skinless chicken breasts
¼ cup ground almonds
2 scallions, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
¼ cup parsley leaves
black pepper
2 teaspoons dried mint
1 egg

Put everything except the wrung-out matzoh sheet into a food processor and pulse until chopped. Add the matzoh sheet and pulse again until you have a finely chopped ground mixture. Tip into a bowl and leave in the fridge for 20 minutes.

Now, this is when you do feel a bit like someone from the old days, spending hours hunched over as you roll meatball after meatball.

Line a baking sheet with plastic wrap and have a bowl of cold water to hand. Take the ground meatball mixture out of the fridge and with wet hands form teaspoonfuls into tiny meatballs. You should get about 50 meatballs out of this mixture.

When you reheat the soup base you can add the meatballs and cook in the gently bubbling liquid for 7 minutes, or you can make the meatballs ahead and freeze them; drop them, unthawed, into the soup and cook them for 10 minutes.

For adding to the soup:
2 cups shelled fava beans, fresh or frozen
bunch mint, chopped
bunch parsley, chopped
4 zucchini (4 cups diced)

Unless the fava beans are really young, you do need to remove their skins too. If they're fresh, shell them then blanch the beans in boiling water for a brief minute before plunging them into a bowl of icy cold water. The skins should slip off pretty easily. If you're using frozen beans, just let them thaw and then press gently on each bean so that the inner vivid green pair of kidney-shaped beans pops out of the casing.

Have the beans ready and finely dice the zucchini. Once the soup is hot again and the meatballs are cooked in it, add both vegetables to the soup. Sprinkle some mint and parsley over the full tureen, with a little more of both on each bowl of soup as you pass it round.

Excerpted from Feast: Food to Celebrate Life
Copyright © 2007 by Nigella Lawson. All rights reserved.