By Chris Malloy Soups are linked with curative properties. There’s a reason, for example, that chicken soup cooked in the Jewish tradition with matzo balls is often called “penicillin,” and that chicken soup is associated with grandmothers and nourishment, warmth, and soulfulness. Our food culture has a vague but long-entrenched idea that chicken soup can offer a remedy more homestyle than the pill capsule, a notion that reaches into the past.