The Avgolemono Recipe That Took Over the Internet

Avgolemono—our sacred, silky, lemony chicken soup. The cure-all. The childhood memory. The dish yiayias swear can raise the dead—has officially gone viral.

And not quietly.
Loudly.
With comments. With opinions. With accusations.
With people who haven’t made soup since 1997 suddenly appointing themselves guardians of Hellenic culinary law.

The spark? A New York Times Cooking recipe titled Avgolemono Chicken Soup With Gnocchi by Carolina Gelen.

The recipe itself is, by any reasonable standard, perfectly pleasant. A one-pot, low-effort interpretation inspired by avgolemono, swapping traditional rice for store-bought gnocchi to create a softer, heartier texture.

Rotisserie chicken. Stock. Lemon zest. Gnocchi simmered gently. Egg yolks tempered carefully with warm broth so they don’t scramble (a step many home cooks still botch). Finished with lemon juice, dill, and black pepper. Clean. Cozy. Weeknight-friendly.

In other words: exactly the kind of recipe NYT Cooking exists to publish.

Across Facebook, Instagram, and beyond, the recipe racked up more than a million likes, comments, and shares combined.

And then came the comments.

Oh, the comments.

I fell deep into a rabbit hole scrolling through them, occasionally clicking on profiles to see the people behind the most dramatic proclamations. I nearly made popcorn.

Within hours, the digital plate-smashing began. Traditionalists charged in, wooden spoons raised, declaring this was not avgolemono. That rice is non-negotiable. That gnocchi has no place near lemon, chicken, or Greece. That this was “fusion,” spoken in the same tone one reserves for heresy.

And then—because it’s the internet, and restraint is extinct—someone escalated it to “cultural appropriation.”

Yes. Someone accused Carolina Gelen and The New York Times of cultural appropriation for adding something Italian to a Greek soup.

Let’s pause.

Avgolemono is not a fragile artifact sealed behind museum glass. It is a living, breathing soup that has survived centuries—wars, famine, migration, diaspora kitchens, and countless personal adjustments. It’s been made with rice, orzo, cracked wheat, chicken, lamb, leftover bones. With too much lemon, not enough lemon. Thick enough to stand a spoon in or thin enough to drink from a mug when you’re sick.

Every Greek family already makes it differently—and insists theirs is the only correct version.

So the idea that a bowl of soup loses its cultural passport because a dumpling floated through it feels less like protecting tradition and more like performance outrage. The modern kind. The comment-section kind. The “I watched one reel and now I’m an authority” kind.

Here’s the truth, no sugar-coating it: if Greek food couldn’t evolve, it wouldn’t have survived the diaspora at all. Greek cuisine has always absorbed, adapted, and substituted.

That’s how recipes moved from village to village, island to island, continent to continent. That’s likely how avgolemono itself evolved—from earlier Mediterranean egg-and-lemon sauces—long before anyone had an Instagram account to document it.

Does gnocchi make this traditional avgolemono? No.
Does it make it illegal? Also no.
Does your yiayia need to approve it? Absolutely not.

You can respect tradition and still laugh when the internet loses its mind over soup.

Make it. Or don’t. Swap the gnocchi for rice and move on. But maybe—just maybe—save cultural appropriation accusations for things that actually deserve them. Let’s retire the haughty finger-pointing and keyboard-warrior outrage (see: “This is not avgolemono. Not even close. Call it something else.”).

And if we’re truly clutching pearls over Italian gnocchi in Greek avgolemono, let’s acknowledge reality: Italians have been remixing Greek culture for centuries—and nobody called the internet police.

Cheesecake? Greek.
Pizza’s spiritual ancestor? Greek flatbread.
The gods? Don’t get me started—Zeus walked so Jupiter could run.

The Roman Empire didn’t just borrow from Greece; it copied, translated, rebranded, and sold it back to the world with better marketing. And somehow, civilization survived.

So no—avgolemono didn’t lose its identity because someone added gnocchi. Greek culture isn’t that fragile. It never has been. It’s resilient, adaptable, confident—and secure enough to let a dumpling float by without filing a formal complaint.

Make your avgolemono with rice. Or orzo. Or gnocchi. Or whatever’s in your pantry when the lemon is calling.

Just don’t confuse tradition with rigidity.

Source: pappaspost.com