Chicken soup is best for convalescent.

Chicken soup is best for convalescent. 
Dr Abe V Rotor 

True.  However, there are specifications of the kind of chicken to be served. First, it must be native chicken. Karurayan is the term in Ilocos for a pure white native chicken which does not bear any trace of color on its feathers. It is preferably a female, dumalaga or fryer, meaning it has not yet reached reproductive stage. It is neither fat nor thin. Usually the herbolario chooses one from recommended specimens. He then instructs and supervises the household in the way the karurayan is dressed, cut, cooked into tinola (stew) and served to the convalescent. He does not ask for any fee for his services, but then he takes home one or two of the specimens that did not pass the specifications.

Chicken soup as a convalescent food is recognized in many parts of the world. Because of its popularity, chicken soup has become associated with healing, not only of the body – but the soul as well. In fact there is a series of books under the common title Chicken Soup -  for the Woman’s Soul, Surviving Soul, Mother’s Soul, Unsinkable Soul, Writer’s Soul, etc. Of course, this is exaggeration, but nonetheless it strengthens our faith that this lowly descendant of the dinosaurs that once walked the earth of its panacean magic. 

Try chicken soup to perk you up in these trying times. But first, be sure your chicken does not carry antibiotic residues, and should not be one that is genetically engineered (GMO). By the way, I was a participant in the rituals made by the herbolario I related.  I was then a farmhand and I was tasked to get the karurayan.  Our flock failed the test, but I found two dumalaga with few colored feathers. I plucked out the colored feathers and presented the birds to Ka Pepe.  They passed the criteria. 

Three days after I asked my convalescing dad how he was doing. “I’m fine, I’m fine, now.” He assured me with a big smile.          

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Trivia:
Rice is the first thing to carry with when moving to a new house. 

Together with rice comes a short list of basic necessities such as a bundle of firewood, salt, beans, nuts, fruits, sugar and coffee. The belief is that the family will not run out of these basic needs, an ethnic practice which still prevails in remote communities. The regard for basic necessities is the common denominator of this practice whatever may be the variations on the items being carried to a new home, says Reny Casanan, in her masteral thesis at UST on Ethnobotany of the Gaddangs of Isabela.

This practice is still be found. I have friends in the province who transferred residence to Manila. The first thing they carried was rice. “Rice is bounty,” they told me. I agree. Rice is cereal, and the root word of cereal is Ceres – the Greek Goddess of Bounty.

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