(NYTIMES) - Chicken soup is one of the most painless and pleasing things to make in a home kitchen. But do modern cooks know that?

During America's inexorable march toward processed food, chicken soup became something to buy, not something to make - Campbell's alone produces more than 50 varieties - and many cooks simply don't know how satisfying a project it is.

"So what comes first, the chicken or the soup?" radiology technician Ashley Aguilar asked after spotting an online photo of my homemade chicken soup.

It is a very deep question, beyond the scope of this column.

But I can confidently state that chicken soup will carry even the laziest cook through a long, cold season.

"It's literally the easiest thing in the world to cook," said Leah Koenig, the author of Modern Jewish Cooking. "You just put stuff in a pot and walk away."

Not quite. There is a method to producing a fragrant, golden, savoury soup you want to eat all winter long.

The chicken soup with root vegetables (carrot, onion, leeks, celery) that we recognise as the American classic was first a staple across northern Europe. Egg noodles, the perfect filling addition, ranged from the thinnest of white threads to fat yellow twists.

The formulas were carried to the US by cooks from Scotland (cock-a-leekie), from Poland (rosol) and from all the places in between where Mennonites, Amish and Jews lived.

Jewish families in villages across the region raised chickens instead of the more usual pigs, which may explain why Ashkenazi Jews are so connected to chicken soup here. In Yiddish, chicken broth is called goldene yoich, golden broth - much as America was called the goldene medina, the golden land - with all the same connotations of richness, sunshine and good fortune.

The first thing to do - apologies in advance - is to ignore the ancestral recipes.

There's much kitchen wisdom to be found on old index cards and in vintage cookbooks, but chickens (and chicken recipes) have changed.

Not so long ago, cooks had the knowledge to choose between pullets and capons, broilers and fryers, spring chickens and stewing roosters - each one best suited to a particular treatment in the kitchen. Our most recent basic chicken soup recipe in The New York Times, from 1995, calls for "a big, old hen" of 2.3kg to 2.7kg, including the neck and giblets.

Today, even if I were to become deeply familiar with the life cycle and gender transitions of the modern chicken, I couldn't easily provision any of those.

Many old recipes also assume that soup is a dish of last resort, designed to wring the final drops of flavour from a valuable piece of protein that has already served its purpose. So Old World chicken soup is often made from an already-cooked carcass, or simmered for many hours, or boosted with onion skins and carrots to mask a lack of flavour and colour.

But thriftiness is no longer the only thing we want to see reflected in our bowl of chicken soup. Instead, we want real ingredients that promise a wholesome dinner (or lunch or snack), floating in a clear golden broth.

To devise a recipe that reflects modern reality but provides a profound, traditional taste, I established some ground rules.

Recipes that call for carcasses or rotisserie chicken cannot be trusted.

Recipes that demand constant skimming are to be ignored.

And recipes that instruct the cook to remove the skin are to be laughed out of the kitchen.

"Chicken skin is not pure fat, as many people seem to believe," said Jennifer McLagan, the author of cookbooks including Fat and Bones.

It's also rich in collagen, which gives the soup its silky unctuousness.

In the absence of parts like feet and necks, she said, the skin provides most of the collagen in modern recipes and is, therefore, crucial to the soup.

Koenig provided an elegantly simple starting point: a whole bird.

Using the entire chicken, which once would have seemed impossibly extravagant for soup, provides the perfect balance of fat and flavour. It doesn't need to be cooked for very long, as the plentiful skin, meat and collagen quickly yield to the heat. That shorter cooking keeps the broth clear, so long as the pot is not allowed to boil.

Boiling every molecule of protein out of animal bones is a key step in making some traditional soups. But McLagan points out that chickens (like all birds) have light, hollow bones with very little marrow, and there's little to be gained by cooking them endlessly.

And poaching the bird at low temperature yields bountiful tender white meat to float in the soup and plenty of dark meat to save for another meal, like chicken potpie.

Since the whole bird is the foundation of the soup, how to choose one?

Sold at a uniform 1.4kg to 1.6kg, today's commercial chickens are raised and labelled in many different ways. Some eat only organic feed but are still raised in crowded barns; others have an all-natural diet and have the run of the farm; others are slaughtered according to strict kosher laws but have been treated with antibiotics.

Since making soup includes the bones and tissues of the bird, it is particularly reassuring here to use the highest-quality poultry you can afford. Buy minimally processed birds from sources you trust that provide transparency about how the animals are raised, processed and packed.

For the best end result, follow a two-step process: First, use that chicken to make a plain but perfect broth; then, bring the add-ons that turn that broth into soup.

The vegetables from cooking the broth are tasty but not bright and fresh enough to be appetising in soup. Strain them out before proceeding with fresh ingredients. (Those cooked vegetables are a nice dividend for the cook; eat them with your favorite vinaigrette.)

Celery is a key flavour component for the broth, but an unscientific poll revealed that the usual bits of cooked celery in the soup are unpopular.

Keeping the carrots, I added on leeks for their pretty pale green colour, and extra allium flavour. (I do not believe in garlic in chicken soup - that's just how I was raised - but some cooks do add a couple of cloves to the broth.)

Parsley root, which looks like a creamy white carrot with parsley sprigs shooting out of the top, is a key flavour component in eastern European soups, worth finding for its fragrant sharpness. A parsnip is a worthy substitute.

Older recipes are very stern about skimming soup as it cooks. This is supposed to remove nameless "impurities" from the soup, much as twisting in yoga positions is supposed to wring out "toxins".

But skimming is not really necessary to remove the inevitable bits of coagulated protein and collagen that form (as they do in any meat soup). When using a whole chicken and a slow poach, there is very little of this stuff to contend with. Whatever iffy bits do rise to the top are removed when the stock is strained.

And the fat does not need to be painstakingly skimmed off because it will be removed - quickly and neatly - when the broth is chilled and it has turned solid. A nice trick is to save that fat and use it to cook the vegetables for the finished soup.

The clear, clean broth can now flow in many directions. Whatever is not to be imminently converted to soup should be frozen for future use.

For the most basic chicken soup, this recipe will work beautifully with or without a starchy component such as noodles, rice, matzo balls or dumplings; they all absorb fat and flavour from the soup. And if the finished soup seems lacklustre or too clear - no golden bubbles winking at the top - stir in spoonfuls of the reserved chicken fat until the situation is remedied.

"Chicken fat is everything when it comes to soup," Koenig said. "You just have to embrace it."