In Which I Cook Chicken Noodle Soup and Talk About Chrissy Teigen

A fun perk about working in publishing is: sometimes you get free stuff. By sometimes I mean “often” and by stuff I mean “books.” Pre COVID, my job had a thrice yearly Free Book Order period for employees. They’d send along a list of 100 titles, and we could pick any seven we wanted, absolutely free. Usually, I got at least one cookbook: the type of book I’m least likely to spend actual money on.

Cookbooks are sort of an artifact to me, an internet kid who always had access to Google by the time I was learning how to cook. Cookbooks feel of a very different era, when you weren’t capable of typing “sugar cookies” somewhere and getting 835,000,000 results in .6th of a second. The cookbook feels like one of those things people used to do, like mailing letters and going to sock hops. And yet, the cookbook persists, even now. It’s very different now, I imagine, and I don’t work in cookbooks so I couldn’t tell you shit about the margins or the business or sales figures. But it feels like cookbooks are still everywhere. And hell, even my internet loving ass likes them. They’re big and glossy and expensive, over the standard adult fiction hardcover price of 26–30 bucks. They’re a bit of a pain in the ass — flipping a page when your hand is covered in flour or salt or chicken? No thanks. And yet, I like them, and I want them. I want a shelf of them in my house to symbolize that I am a real adult who cooks well. I like them, I think, because they are specific and curated. This is not generic sugar cookies — this is someone’s specific sugar cookie, and they can tell you a little story about it and how it came to be. (This is also why I, controversially, like the blog posts above free online recipes. Tell me about your grandmother, random internet lady, I want to know!)

So when I can get cookbooks for free, I do. And then I, like, never open them.

That’s why I own but have rarely used the two mega popular Chrissy Teigen cookbooks: Cravings and Cravings: Hungry for More. These books launched Chrissy into the stratosphere, turning her from a model-cum-Twitter-celeb to a certified cookware and lifestyle brand. It’s Chrissy’s Goop. (Except, unlike Goop, I actually like those books, and I like Chrissy.)

Anyway, despite owning both books I’ve only ever regularly made two of her dishes, both inspired by her Thai mother: her pad grapow (basil chicken) and her jok moo, a pork congee-ish dish that I love.

But it’s a pandemic! And it’s fall, so I’m inside more and bored more. What the hell: shouldn’t I cook?

Which is why, on Thursday, I started making her Rotochick Soup.

An aside: There was a period where I’d argue Chrissy Teigen was one of the most beloved people in America. She has the perfect mix of model good looks, down to earth realness, snark, and “good politics” to make her a Twitter hero, quipply retweeting the president and calling him a douchebag to thousands of likes. Cravings was a brand like Goop, except unlike Goop, Chrissy could give a fuck about being healthy. She makes banana bread and drops bouillon cubes into stew and “cuts corners” in a way that feels real without losing flavor. There is no homemade bone broth in Cravings, not when store bought will do. Why roast a whole chicken when the grocery store sells rotisserie ones for seven bucks? This is what made Chrissy popular; she is like you, she doesn’t have time to stew something for fifteen hours, she is busy and she is hungry now.

(Of course: it’s always easy for thin people to flout “being healthy” so long as they remain thin. Of course: it’s always easier for the ultra rich to feel relatable to common man, even when they aren’t relatable to the common man. I wouldn’t say by any stretch that Chrissy fell from favor. But as things got worse she got less snarky; as the reality of Donald Trump rose she became less ever present. Maybe it’s just that we all remembered that we live in the real world, where a model dunking on the President doesn’t save children in cages. When she got targeted by Qanon conspiracy theorists claiming she was an Epstein accomplice — never mind that at the age they accused her of being on her plane, she’d have been a victim, not a partner — suddenly the world felt a lot less funny, and her brand felt less important than her life, and she stepped away, a bit. I’d step away too, honestly. I’d take a walk.

And then, of course, she lost the baby. But I’m getting to that.)

In Cravings Chrissy tells you, like an old friend, that her friend Missy called a rotisserie chicken Rotochick once and now that’s what she calls them. So that’s why it’s Rotochick Chicken Soup. The dish simple. You buy the chicken. You buy the broth. You buy the egg noodles. You stew carrots, onion, celery, garlic, salt, pepper, thyme (I added parsley) in ten cups of chicken broth for 45 minutes; you add the pre-cooked shredded chicken (about half the rotochick) and you add the egg noodles (about two cups pre-cooked) and you cook 5–10 minutes more. Done. It’s a breeze. It’s delicious. It’s salty and simple and mindless. Anyone could do it.

That’s why Chrissy is relatable. Forget the myth of being one of us for a minute and accept the reality that most people do not have the time or energy to roast a whole goddamn chicken, then shred it, then use the bones of that chicken to make the broth, which takes a whole day, so you’re not even having the goddamn soup for like two more days after that. And who thinks that far ahead for chicken noodle soup?

Chicken Noodle Soup is what I want at the end of a long, cold day, when my nose is red and runny and I need something hot. Chicken Noodle Soup is what I want when I’m sick, alone in Brooklyn, an adult wishing that for just fifteen minutes I could roll back time and be a child, my mother standing over me with a thermometer offering a bowl of it. Chicken Noodle Soup is what I want when I crave comfort. When I’m sad. When I feel loss.

When I feel grief.

Okay. So. The baby.

And when she got criticized for talking about that loss, her baby, for sharing photos, I got mad, like she was my friend. She’s a public figure. She was publicly pregnant. If she is no longer pregnant, but not holding a newborn child, wouldn’t people demand answers? Of course she had to say something. And sharing the photos — I get it! I took photos at my grandmother’s funeral on my pink Motrolla Razr flip phone. The human instinct to share in grief is normal and natural, as is the human instinct to share in joy. It is not a cry for attention. And even if it is, so the fuck what? Do I wish she was able to do things privately if she wished? Of course! But I also understand the instinct to share. When I was ten years old and I texted my friends the news that my aunt had died, I wondered if it was me looking for attention and sympathy. But of course it was. Because I needed it; I needed the validation of other people telling me what I was feeling was real and awful and strange. That’s normal. We call things a cry for attention out of a critical sense — a need to dismiss a child throwing a tantrum, a need to roll our eyes at the girl posting sad things on her Instagram. But don’t we all cry for attention sometime? Are we all not allowed to wail publicly for a minute? Have you never cried in a train car, or reached out for a hug? Isn’t this human? Isn’t this normal?

I don’t really care if you interpersonally like or dislike Chrissy Teigen. I’m not here to talk about the cult of celebrity, or how it’s dangerous to idolize people, or how our constant need to put people on pedestals only guarantees that they will eventually fall. Forget all of it for a minute. Think of her as a person. Think of her as a woman who has lost a child. Try to picture it. Try to get yourself to the empathy point. Try to imagine how you feel if you really, actually, knew her.

I felt such cavernous, horrid loss for her. And there is nothing I can do, because even if we were best fucking friends there’d be nothing I can do, because that’s what grief is. And I’ve been talking a lot about grief these days. Once, my mother told me she thought the great project of her life was learning to live with and understand grief, and I think maybe she is right, about all of us, that the biggest thing that makes us human is dealing with and living with loss. And I know that sounds depressing but I don’t mean it to, because I actually think loss and grief are wonderful and beautiful. They bring us together.

Who do you share meals with? Your friends and family and neighbors. And what do you do when those friends and family and neighbors die? You bring food to their houses. That’s the summation of human experience. When someone dies, you cook a fucking casserole. (Okay, maybe that’s too Midwest for some of you, but you get it.) I sat in living rooms and ate plates of re-heated mac and cheese for days after my aunts died because everyone understands being too sad to cook. And they understand it, so they cook for you. So they bring you food.

I am not Chrissy Teigen’s neighbor. Except, I am, in the sense that we are all neighbors, and that we all owe each other love, that’s what empathy is, that’s what humanity is, and if you don’t feel that way then tragically you are an asshole. I cannot bring Chrissy Teigen food; but I imagine that wherever she is, it’s possible her father is there, and it’s possible he is cooking her, and it’s possible he is making the same chicken noodle soup I have made, and it’s possible that she is eating it. And in that way we are sharing a meal, which is intimate, and in that way we are connected.

So I made the soup. I cannot bring it to her house, but I can make it, because that’s what you do when someone dies.

I didn’t set off to make the soup because I felt grief for her; but in the middle of it I was overcome by a wave of sadness because it felt familiar. This sharing of meals. This sharing of food. It’s all I can do. When my aunts died, the women who brought chicken soup to my mother’s house and my uncle’s house would not have roasted a whole chicken; they would not have broken down the bones into broth. They would have used store bought. They would have gone rotochick. They would have made Chrissy Teigen’s soup.

(An exception: my father famously makes his own broth in huge batches and freezes it; when our neighbor died earlier this year, he made her family soup often, because it was the only thing her young grandson would eat. BONE BROTH CHICKEN SOUP. I say this to add some levity, because this is funny as shit, that bougie kid eating bone broth chicken soup from my fancy dad, who of course just happens to have eight quarts of bone broth in the freezer at all times, because he is like that. I guess some of us do not cut corners. Love you, pops.)

The world is on fire and I am overcome by grief for so many people — for Breonna Taylor’s family and the children at the border and the people who lost loved ones to COVID and my neighbor who died and Chrissy Teigen and her baby — but I can make chicken noodle soup. I make it because I am sad and because I own Chrissy’s cookbook it is Chrissy Teigen’s chicken noodle soup and then I can feel sad for Chrissy Teigen and then we can be in our grief together, a collective thing, because grief is always a collective thing. This is human. This is normal. This is good. This is how we should be. A world of people who have empathy and want to grieve together, who want to break bread together. This is how it should be.

And the soup? Man, the soup is fucking delicious.

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