But if you stop your scroll for the details, you’ll see that the moniker is just a playful descriptor for the vivid green hue of the dish, which is the result of a whole bunch of bright herbs, scallions, blanched spinach and jalapeño peppers that are all blitzed up in a blender with garlic and ginger. That bright and zingy mixture gets swirled into an otherwise relatively tame chicken-and-rice soup.
Its creator, chef and recipe developer Meredith Hayden, first posted a video of herself preparing it in October. In it she makes a bold declaration that now seems prophetic: “Chicken noodle soup better count its days, because there’s a new sick-girl soup in town.”
Since then, the clip has been watched more than 2.2 million times, and spawned imitators like so many schools of tadpoles. “OK, so I got influenced,” one fan wrote on Instagram. “Scrolled past this glorious green bowl somewhere and had to look it up. It’s so good!”
“This stuff is amaziiiiiiing,” raved another.
I stumbled on the recipe at exactly the right moment. I was recovering from one of the various nasty illnesses that seemed to have felled everyone you know at some point this winter. Like many people, when I’m feeling low, I crave chicken soup and other comforting foods, many of which happen to be on the beige side of the color spectrum. But here was this verdant bowl with sinus-clearing flavors (raw garlic and ginger!) that appealed to my groggy palate.
I had enjoyed watching Hayden’s series of videos last summer in which she chronicled her routine as a personal chef to the rich and famous in the Hamptons. In them, she whipped up meals with farm-stand and garden-plucked produce and herbs that had me wishing I had a staff of my own (and a sun-dappled beachfront patio, too, sigh). And swamp soup’s promise of bright flavors harked back to those warmer days, even as it offered chicken-soup comfort.
One grocery-delivery order, a little simmering and blending later, I had my own bowlful. I made a few tweaks — instead of using precooked chicken and rice, I cooked both in the simmering chicken stock. That meant a longer cooking time, but it cut down on dishes. And in the recipe she posted on her blog, Hayden suggested starting out by adding only half the blender contents and tasting to see if it was too strongly flavored. I did — and proceeded to dump the entire contents in for maximum flavor.
I opted for a good squeeze of the suggested citrus on top (I used lime, because, well, its color was on-theme), as well as a drizzle of soy sauce, which offered tart and salty complements, respectively. The end result was as bracing as I had hoped, with the kick of raw garlic and the spicy, vegetal green mixture leavening the hearty, rice-thickened broth. It even tasted green.
