Chicken Wing Soup?
A love letter to the most puzzling minhag in your Shabbos bowl
Soup has been a Jewish staple for ages. It stars in almost every Friday night meal, gets treated like a minhag avoseinu beyadeinu, and is sold in random American supermarkets by Manischewitz right next to their matzah bricks and that gefilte fish no one ever buys. Chicken soup is basically the Jewish national fuel. It powered half of us through yeshiva. It even powered the Hebrew Hammer.
If you eat around Crown Heights, though, you quickly learn something crucial. Everyone’s chicken soup tastes almost exactly the same. There must be one secret mix in Kahns that the entire neighborhood uses. And for the most part, I have no complaints; the Crown Heights Chicken Soup is solid. But the first time I dipped my spoon in and discovered chicken wings sitting in the bowl, I froze. Everyone else at the table was eating normally. Meanwhile I was staring at these wings like they were a puzzle cube.
As I’m sure you all know, soup is supposed to be consumed with a spoon. In keeping to this rule, soup should only contain those components that can be consumed with a spoon. With the inclusion of chicken wings, I deduced that they can be handled only in one of three ways:
Use a fork and knife
Use your hands
Skip the wings entirely and politely excavate around them
None of these options blend naturally with the graceful, civilized act of eating soup. You cannot pick up a saucy wing in the middle of a Shabbos table without feeling like you are committing some kind of etiquette crime. You also cannot cut them politely without your spoon giving you the side-eye.
Maybe the idea is that the wings make the soup more flavorful. But while the Crown Heights Chicken Soup is moderately flavorful, none of the flavor from the soup ever seems to transfer back into the wings. It is a major mystery to me why they are included at all. Tradition? Habit? A mysterious minhag from somewhere between Eastern Europe and Kingston Avenue?
Whatever the reason, the phenomenon endures. And every time I see those two wings drifting in the broth like lost swimmers, I laugh. It is one of those tiny quirks that makes Crown Heights what it is, a place where even the soup has its own minhagim.