Slovak Sunday bone broth soup. (source: Naomi Hužovičová)
For Slovaks, soup is a necessary start to lunch. At my children's school cafeteria, a two page document was taped to the wall where the children lined up, outlining the benefits of eating soup. Among other benefits listed, which I have since forgotten, was that you fill up faster on less food and that it gets the gastric juices flowing for better digestion.
On weekdays soup can be of any kind but on Sundays, at least traditionally, the soup was bone broth based. In recent years, nutritional science has discovered that bone broths do in fact carry many benefits, such as being a source of collagen and improving digestion.
Slovak broth soup consists of thin egg noodles and root vegetables (namely carrot, parsley root and celery root) swimming in a yellowish broth topped with fresh parsley.
There is a vital difference between Slovak bone broth and most instructions you will find online in English, however. English recipes either use bones from roasted meat or first roast the bones before simmering them in water. Slovak bone broth, however, uses raw bones. The taste between raw and roasted bones is different, though I can't quite describe how.
