An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

by Tamar Adler

If you’re going to eat it immediately, let the broth settle, then use a ladle to skim any fat off the top of the liquid by making a little whirlpool with your ladle and lightly skimming what rises to the top of the ladle. This takes practice. If you can wait, put the broth in the refrigerator. Tomorrow there will be a thin layer of fat over the top of the broth, which you can skim off with a spoon and save for sautéing vegetables or spreading on toast. If I’m making a to-do of it, I serve some of the broth as a first course. In that case, I cook a few vegetables or pasta that are as small and beautiful as I can manage and serve a spoonful of them in each bowl of broth. If it’s summer, dice a little zucchini and onion and cook them in butter in a pan. If it’s spring, pull a little of the broth aside and cook English peas in a combination of broth and butter. If it’s autumn, little cubes of butternut squash and rice are good. If it’s winter, cook tiny pasta shells or heartier pasta, like tortellini. Warm enough broth for everyone, then warm the vegetables, grains, or pasta in the broth, and ladle it out in bowls with spoonfuls of each in each. If it’s a second or third or fourth day soup I’m making, I pick off whatever meat is left on the carcass, heat up my broth, and cook noodles in it, omitting vegetables entirely and using enough noodles that the resulting soup is a golden broth, flush with swollen noodles and little bits of chicken. I like twisted pasta like fusilli and...