Basya Tsybukmakher
Do you know how, in the old country, a chicken makes its way onto the Shabbat table?
Let's leave aside her difficult childhood and meet the chicken at the point where she has fulfilled her life's purpose: she has become a kosher meat product produced under the supervision of the Chief Rabbinate of Russia. Such a lofty purpose comes with an equally lofty price, but Heaven finances our Shabbat expenses from a separate source, so I won't tell you the price.
Onward! The community in our city orders meat products, pays for them, and brings them to the synagogue. These simple actions conceal complicated logistics and a great deal of stress, but that isn't what we're writing about. An ordinary noble don synagogue congregant sees the chicken and other delicacies in the freezer case and, after throttling his inner toad of stinginess, buys something.
Last week, I bought some sausages and sushki crackers at the synagogue, and then my not-quite-throttled toad began to grumble discontentedly. Just at the right moment, someone suggested that instead of a chicken I take …what was it called? A chicken soup pack, was it? Anyway, there was something meaty sitting in a plastic-wrapped tray. Cheap and cheerful!
On Friday morning, some very unusual objects appeared in the thawed tray. At first, they looked to me like fragments of fuselage after a plane crash. But I strained my meager knowledge of anatomy and realized that these were pieces of a rib cage: ribs and thin muscle tissue. But what a rib cage it must have been! This chicken (or was it an ostrich?) could have played a helicon! On Fridays, as you know, there is no time for lengthy deliberation, so I washed the pieces of fuselage and shoved them into a pot. And on Shabbat, the pot contained a magnificent cholent!
And here is the recipe:
Bring water with the pieces of fuselage (or whatever more recognizable bits you have) to a boil. Let it cool and pour almost all the broth into another pot. Put two or three of these fuselages, finely chopped onion, a carrot, garlic, zucchini, and salt into our main pot. Add a little prepared lobio to the pot, and an hour before Shabbat, place it at the edge of the hot plate, leaving the lid slightly ajar, so it doesn't boil too vigorously. The result is a rich clear broth the color of dark amber, with a variety of pieces in it. And the zucchini comes to look and taste like mushrooms.
Shabbat shalom!