I remember my grandmother — all four-feet-eight of her — standing tall before the grocer, as he rang up her order. “No, sir! I will not pay 59 cents a pound for grapes,” she said. “We’ll just wait till the price comes down.” He sighed, removed the grapes from the scale, and handed me a small cluster.
This winter’s ever-rising food costs triggered a full-color memory of this scene for me, complete with vivid images of the sawdust on the grocery floor, the clerk’s starched white coat, and my own timid self, clutching my grandmother Emma’s hand.
Emma Bergey Walters’s frugality did not mean you ever went hungry at her house. There, apple, mince, and shoofly pies, roasted pork with sauerkraut, pot pies with ham and noodles, and omnipresent mashed potatoes all meant a snack never crossed your mind.
My grandmother learned her frugality as a child, even though her family was prosperous. Educated through eighth grade, she married a man who was a mechanical engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad and raised her children and ran the household with pride. To her, keeping a frugal kitchen was about cherishing resources — an old idea that resonates again now.
The most wondrous trick she and my mother possessed was the ability to turn out three good meals from one chicken — a feat I had almost forgotten until my own kids began talking about how to cook differently to save on food costs.
A chicken, in my grandmother’s day, was the centerpiece of a nice Sunday dinner. That may seem strange if you’ve come to think of chicken as an everyday food, a snack, even, that you can polish off in nuggets without leaving your car. But it’s not impossible to get three meals out of one bird. It’s an art that satisfies some deeply practical human instincts.
A basic rule: calm shopping — you want to secure a whole chicken at a good price. I’ve found that is possible as long as you don’t buy a chicken just because it’s on your list; buy one when it’s on special. Consider that a whole chicken makes six servings. Thus, you can serve two to three and set aside the remaining meat and bones for the additional meals.
Roasting the poultry with lemon and garlic will infuse it with flavor, and along with baked sweet potatoes (drizzled, perhaps, with cardamom butter) and some greens, a roast chicken is one easy dinner.
There are lots of options for the next one. Working on our $5 Foodie cookbook, our family turned leftover roasted chicken into creamed chicken and waffles, Vietnamese noodle salads, shredded chicken tacos, croquettes, stir fries, and curries, to name just a few good meals. A favorite, though, at our house, is chicken pie: chicken morsels sliced from the remaining roasted chicken, along with carrots, peas, or mushrooms, combined in a basic white sauce and baked in a pie crust.
For a third dinner, soup is the answer. First, you’ll simmer the chicken bones for about an hour in two quarts of water with a roughly chopped onion, carrot, and a stalk or two of celery. From there, you might make old-fashioned chicken noodle, but my favorite is a fine Italian soup that is quite a special transformation of chicken broth with rice and leafy greens — escarole, chard, or spinach.
The recipe for greens and rice soup is an Italian one I happened on long before I happened on my husband, Hugo, who has brought many other Italian recipes into my life. Hugo likes his with a melting layer of Parmesan on top.
Greens and Rice Soup
Serves 6
Using ingredients you have on hand is a good rule for a frugal kitchen. Peas are a good substitute for the leafy greens. Tomato paste gives the soup its rosy hue, but, in a pinch, ketchup will do. Arborio rice, which is creamy and chewy when cooked, is excellent, but other kinds of rice will be just fine, as will cheeses other than Parmigiano-Reggiano.
3 Tbsp. olive oil
6 cloves garlic
2 Tbsp. tomato paste
6½ cups chicken broth
¾ cup arborio rice
1 lb. dark, leafy greens (like spinach, escarole, chard, or kale), chopped
Salt and pepper
¾ cup Parmesan, Romano, or pecorino cheese, grated
A few pinches of nutmeg, optional
- In a medium-size soup pot, cook the garlic cloves in the oil over low heat until they’ve softened, about 2 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste.
- Add the chicken broth (or 4 cups packaged chicken broth plus 2½ cups of water) and bring to a boil. Add rice to the pot and season with salt and pepper. Cover and cook over medium-low heat for about 7 minutes (if using brown rice, you’ll need to either precook it or allow an additional 30 minutes of cooking time). You want the rice to be just slightly underdone at this point.
- Add the greens (except if you’re using spinach) and simmer the soup, covered, for about 5 minutes more, until the greens are tender, and the rice has given the soup creaminess. If using spinach, add it for only the last minute of cooking.
- This is a thick soup, although if it seems too thick, thin it with a little water. Check the seasonings but go easy on salt because the cheese will add more, especially pecorino. Last, cover the soup with the grated cheese and several pinches of nutmeg. Replace the lid so the cheese softens, and in 2-3 minutes it’s ready.
