Cooking With Cookbooks in 2025 - Portico & Broth

It was really cold for a good chunk of January here in Alabama this year. And after a near decade of denying my susceptibility to chiller temperatures in this southern climate (“it’s only cold like once a year!”) I'm going to admit it, I’m not a fan. I grew up in places with much longer winters—first in Central New York (one of the cloudiest regions in the country) and then in Southern Vermont where winters are both beautiful and long. See picture below for reference on what the formative years of my life felt like weatherwise… 

In my many years down south I have always experienced a little bit of what I describe as “reverse seasonal affective disorder,” particularly when it is bright and lovely out around the December holidays. But I have to admit that this year, after two weeks of dripping faucets and bundling up in our hundred-year old house and scraping ice off my car’s windshield with a credit card (why do I never learn and buy an ice scraper? ), I was done. And as we trudged through the flurries and single digits and school closures, a light at the end of the tunnel kept me going, the insatiable idea I’d got in my head to make the broth I’m sharing with you today.

For the holidays this year, sweet Stu gifted me all things based on interests I’d talked about wanting to deepen connections to this year, including gardening and cooking. These two hobbies have defined so much of my adult life, but both had fallen to the wayside in the blur of early parenting, neglected in the name of pizza delivery . But as we rounded the corner of the first year, something like a groove had been found; sleep stabilized, routines were established (even if they were often broken), and some small pockets of time presented themselves. We started clearing some rundown garden beds during naptime, and E began to enjoy exploring the backyard (even if probably too much dirt was then consumed from said garden beds). My tomatoes survived the second summer of E’s life after a tragic fate during summer number one, when a newborn’s needs had to come first. This very week we are going to a garden class together. And as we step back into the world of growing, so too has cooking re-entered the picture. 

So all that to say, I was very excited when I unwrapped Leah Koenig’s Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish Kitchen at the end of 2024, a cookbook I had been coveting since it was announced. Koenig’s cookbook Modern Jewish Cooking is probably one of the physical cookbooks I utilize the most. It’s well worn, soup-splattered, dog-eared, as opposed to many others which sit on my shelf in sadly pristine condition. I knew this would be my first foray into a new project; a goal I made at the beginning of this year to cook from a cookbook (a physical cookbook) once a month, and to write about it here.

Why cook from cookbooks? Heading into 2025, fresh with new year good intentions, I’ve also been thinking about attention and distraction, consuming good advice through Oliver Burkeman’s Meditation for Mortals, and generally trying to consider where life feels too cluttered. And honestly one place that could use some minimalist attention is the never-ending list of saved links that represent my digital recipe box, the endless scrolling on the NYT cooking app (it’s a love-hate relationship), the availability of that just-right recipe always at your fingertips online. E loves to look through cookbooks, and in the hours I’ve spent sitting on the kitchen floor with him doing so I’ve realized we have any type of recipe we could ever be looking for sitting right at our fingertips; recipes that may even challenge or stretch the imagination in unexpected ways. Plus, looking for a recipe in a cookbook is one less moment to get distracted by the phone, a device I’m feeling on the outs with going into this year. 

So I started the year cooking from Portico and I was so glad that I did that in fact I did it twice; first on a freezing weekend with a good friend in town, where we made delicious tomato rice, spinach with pine nuts & raisins, and fried artichoke hearts from the jar, and then, the next week (still freezing), a beef and chicken broth that I’d been eyeing since my first flip through. What I love about this broth is that it utilizes a whole chicken and beef flanken bones (which themselves hold plenty of meat), so not only did we enjoy the delicious products of the broth-making itself, but we enjoyed the meat for days afterward; tender chicken made into delicious salad, beef shredded and baked into a frittata with caramelized onions (another genius recipe in this book). The making of chicken salad of course necessitated the pickling of onions, which were then consumed with many things throughout the week (including on fresh-baked rye with cream cheese; lucky for me, Stu's new year resolution is bread-baking). Many doors were opened by this broth.

I find that the act of making broth is almost as nourishing as the consuming of it; it filled our sunny house with warm smells on a day off, bound to the kitchen by the occasional stir. And I’ve always loved the warmth of the steam when poured into the strainer; a savory steam facial of sorts. We didn’t even make soup. We drank this broth from mugs over that last cold weekend, gave a jar to a friend with the flu, talked about how we may need a bigger stockpot as a family of three. And the act of cooking from a book again felt nourishing too, spinning off into new recipes, generating bounty to share with friends. By the following week it was sixty degrees and sunny again and I had two quarts of rich broth in the freezer, for the next cold or rainy day.

Chicken and Beef Broth (Brodo) 

Ingredients

• 1-3 lb. chicken *

• 2 ½ lbs flanken ribs

• 2 medium yellow onions, halved, not peeled

• 2 large carrots, peeled and halved

• 2 large celery stalks, trimmed and halved

• 4 medium garlic cloves, smashed and peeled

• Generous spoonful (handful?) of peppercorns **

• 1 tablespoon, or more of salt

*The recipe notes to break it down into 8 pieces trimmed of excess fat…oops… I missed that part and it yielded a delicious fall-apart chicken that I pulled in pieces from the pot at the end. Go your own way! 

** Hers didn’t call for pepper, but it felt like an easy fit. Note that two plum tomatoes are also optional, but I left them out.

Add the chicken and beef to a tall 8-quart soup pot (I discovered at the last minute our pot was much smaller, so in theory yours shouldn't be quite so brimming). Add the onions, carrots, celery, garlic and tomatoes & peppercorns (if using). Add enough water to cover the ingredients (as much as you can…maybe if I’d actually broken down my chicken that would have helped… or used the right size pot…). Bring to a boil, skimming foam as you go. When it boils, turn the heat low, partially cover and cook until chicken and beef are tender (2-3 hours). If, like me, you are low on space, flip the chicken part way through to make sure it cooks on all sides, assuming you plan to use the meat. 

When it’s done, remove the vegetables and meat with tongs, setting the meat aside for later use. Pour the rest through a fine-mesh strainer into a large bowl. Enjoy that delicious steam filling your kitchen and opening your pores! Return it to the pot, add salt, then add more if it needs it (mine did).

Once it cools, skim fat off the top and strain again (if you want, or don’t if you want it a little fattier). Enjoy hot, use for soup, freeze as needed and check out Portico for the rest of the yummy recipes mentioned in this post.