Mom got her chicken soup recipe from her mom. It’s a simple, brothy affair with lots of dill, the kind of soup that’s popular throughout the Yiddish diaspora, often referred to half-jokingly as “Jewish penicillin,” because it always makes you feel better, no matter what ails you.
Yiddish is the native tongue of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, and is based mostly on German but also contains Russian and Slavic words and a Hebrew alphabet. It’s a culture as much as a language, with its own traditions, recipes, and history of struggle, in a community that has always been more a state of mind than a nation with borders.
