Avgolemono soup

By Emily Hartman

This dish is one of my favorites.  It combines two of my favorite things, lemon and soup.  I think I was born with the genetic disposition to always need lemon.  As it turns out lemons are incredibly good for you.  They have many vitamins and help kill germs. Lemon helps kill germs because of its acidity.  Lemon also provides so many vitamins at the same time because it must grow in sunlight and have rich moist soil.  Lemons contain vitamins B, C, copper, magnesium, iron, phosphorus, potassium, and fiber.  With this ammount of healthful ingredients in lemons I am even more drawn to them.  So ever since I have had Avgolemono soup I can not have chicken noodle soup without lemon in it.  Also, it is not bad to have when sick, get the vitamins and kill the germs at the same time, a double whammy.

Avgolemono soup was first given to me on easter when I was still an infant.  It was a dish made by my Papu, grandfather in Greek.  It was delicious but I never really understood my love for this soup untill I was older.  After my Papu died I all but forgot about this soup.  It wasnt untill my family had gone to a medeterranean resturant when I was in highschool that I remembered this soup.  Now that I am older my interest and love of this dish has been rekindled.  Its warm creamy goodness, chicken chunks, soft carrots, small easy to eat noodles, and lemon.  I can not stress enough how much I love lemon.  What really drove me to cooking and learning about this dish was my attempt to reconnect with my Greek heritage.  My mother would always tell me about the great intelectuals and food that came from her family, in a way I wanted to know and connect with that past.  I have studied so much about my heritage and even connected with my family in Greece.  For this assignment though I had to look deeper, find the origin of the food I most loved.  In that case lemon.

In my research I found that lemon originated some where in Asia.  It was brought to Greece by the Sephardic Jews who migrated throughout the Middle East and up into Europe.  They also brought the recipe for the lemon sauce that is made, originally the soup was just a lemon sauce.  A sauce with lemon egg and broth.  For that I am thankfull. There are so many Greek dishes that taste so good because of lemon.

I found that soup was originally just bread in a bowl with broth poured over it.  The reason for the bread was because people thought that bread was super nutritius.  Well kind of, bread then was made with wheat that had small maggots in it and bits of stone, so protine and minerals?  Soup became so much better over the decades and the result is better than ever.