Chicken

A Sweet, Sour, Thrifty-As-Can-Be Dish That's Been in My Family for 100 Years

April  4, 2017

Chicken gizzards are not as lovely a symbol as Proust’s madeleine, but they are the gateway to my childhood and to my New York Jewish immigrant roots.

Once or twice a year, I make a dish we call chicken fricassee, one that my mother and grandmother used to make. If it's Passover, I lay it over matzo farfel: Growing up, this was always the appetizer course for our seder meals, served over the broken up matzo bits after reading the first half of the Haggadah and before the matzo ball soup. Other times of the year, I'll spoon it over rice, as is pictured below.

According to the 1910 US Census, my maternal grandfather was a boarder in a tenement apartment in what we now think of as the East Village on the cusp of the Lower East Side, just a few blocks from where my niece lived, some hundred years later, in one of her most upscale post-college apartments. He shared the one-bedroom apartment with a young couple and their three-year-old, plus with two female boarders; all of the adults were Russian Jews in their 20s who had immigrated during the first few years of the twentieth century and were now working in the garment industry.

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My grandmother, also of Russian Jewish stock, was from South Philly, where she was the daughter of a peddler who called himself a “salesman” on the same 1910 Census. She worked in a millinery factory until she married and moved to New York in 1914.

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Top Comment:
“My mother's version of this was without tomatoes and cooked in a thickened rich chicken broth with carrots and baby onions. No flanken either. Hers had little meatballs instead, cooked in the rich broth. Our dining room wallpaper and paint were in the forest green range, and the living room was chartreuse green! You brought me right back.”
— ctgal
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This dish came out of the household they made together in Brooklyn. It may now be a hip borough, the origin place of many a food trend, but my sister once termed it our “Old Country.”

My grandmother (left) and with my mother (right).

For my grandmother, probably shopping somewhere on Nostrand or Flatbush Avenues in the 1930s, pocketbook hanging from the crook of her arm, the ingredients for the origins of this homey dish would have been as thrifty as can be: beef bones with just a few shreds of meat and sinew clinging to them to add heft and flavor to the sauce, improbably sweet and chewy chicken gizzards and chicken neck bones practically given away by butchers, and a little tomato sauce, some sugar, and some lemon.

When I wrote about this dish last fall for the Jewish Food Experience, a DC-area platform connecting people around Jewish food both online and in person, I tried to uncover how my family might have arrived at its unusual name:

This fricassee bears hardly any resemblance to the creamy French dish of the same name. According to The Food Lover’s Companion, fricassee (frihk-uh-SEE) is a dish of meat (usually chicken) that has been sautéed in butter before being stewed with vegetables. Chicken? Check. But that is the end of the similarity. Certainly there is no butter, as this evolved out of a kosher house. Nor has a vegetable ever entered this dish, as far as I’m aware.

Further research showed that while there are other Ashkenazi families that make a dish called chicken fricassee, my family’s is not like these, either. Mimi Sheraton and Sara Moulton describe what seems to be the most common: a kosher paprikash featuring chicken parts, onion, some liquid and paprika.

Joan Nathan’s version from Jewish Cooking in America lacks the paprika, but includes tomato sauce. At some point, one of my maternal forebears conflated this style with a sweet and sour dish, creating a delicious amalgam of the two.

Further research showed that while there are other Ashkenazi families that make a dish called chicken fricassee, my family’s is not like these, either. Mimi Sheraton and Sara Moulton describe what seems to be the most common: a kosher paprikash featuring chicken parts, onion, some liquid and paprika.

Joan Nathan’s version from Jewish Cooking in America lacks the paprika, but includes tomato sauce. At some point, one of my maternal forebears conflated this style with a sweet and sour dish, creating a delicious amalgam of the two.

My grandparents, sometime in the 1940s.

The earliest chicken fricassee I remember, from when I was a little girl, had gizzards and necks, with some flanken bones and meat. Later, my mother added chicken wings and then, even later, chicken drumsticks made an appearance. When I began making fricassee in my own home, I left out the necks, as my family were not keen about sucking the rich sauce out from the little bones. Sometimes, to please my husband and son, I make an all-beef version with flanken and tiny meatballs and no giblets at all.

While that version satisfies them, for me, it’s lacking the integral component. Once or twice a year, I make fricassee with gizzards and as I eat it, I am transported back to the my youth in the 1970s. My grandmother and parents are still with us, my aunts and uncles, my older sister, all of us around the seder table in our chartreuse green dining room. It’s the gizzards that provide the bittersweet portal.

Read my full article on my family’s fricassee on the Jewish Food Experience. Excerpted with permission.

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12 Comments

ctgal August 16, 2019
I just found this and I could cry reading it. My mother's version of this was without tomatoes and cooked in a thickened rich chicken broth with carrots and baby onions. No flanken either. Hers had little meatballs instead, cooked in the rich broth. Our dining room wallpaper and paint were in the forest green range, and the living room was chartreuse green! You brought me right back.
 
healthierkitchen September 12, 2019
I'm so glad you wrote and that this story/recipe resonated with you. Thank you. And, it's great to meet another resident of a chartreuse green home!
 
Scott G. April 15, 2017
This is exactly the way I remember it. and I like the gizzards too
 
healthierkitchen April 16, 2017
I have some frozen, come on down!
 
calendargirl April 10, 2017
Just now seeing this, Wendy. Lovely piece.
 
healthierkitchen April 10, 2017
thanks so much cg!
 
drbabs April 4, 2017
Wendy, how sweet! Where in Russia is your family from? My mother's father came from Odessa.
 
healthierkitchen April 4, 2017
My grandmother's parents were from Kiev. She was actually born in the US though! Sadly, I don't know much at all about grandfather. The census just says "Russia," and I've never heard anything from relatives.
 
Emily H. April 4, 2017
Love it, Wendy!
 
healthierkitchen April 4, 2017
Thanks so much Emily!
 
EmilyC April 4, 2017
Lovely article and recipe, Wendy.
 
healthierkitchen April 4, 2017
Thank you emily!