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Another Sauce for Cold Meat
Take equal quantities of ripe tomatoes and young okras; chop the okras fine, skin the tomatoes, and slice one onion. Stew all together very slowly until tender, and season with half a tablespoonful of butter and a little cayenne pepper and salt.
A tomato-and-okra stew served cool alongside cold meat rather than a poured sauce in the modern sense. It is simple enough that the whole result hangs on the okra.
- The hinge: young okra"Young" is doing real work here. Larger pods, past about three or four inches, tend to be fibrous and stay stringy through long stewing. Chop them fine, as instructed, and expect the cut surfaces to release mucilage, which will thicken the mixture.
- Equal quantities of whatThe original does not say whether by weight or volume. Either reading works; taking it by weight, roughly a pound of tomatoes to a pound of trimmed okra, with one onion as the recipe directs.
- Skinning tomatoesScore the base, drop into boiling water for 20-30 seconds, then into cold water; the skins slip off. Seeds and juice can stay, since the mixture is meant to cook down.
- "Very slowly until tender"Lowest possible heat, covered for the first stretch, then uncovered to reduce. Reckon on 40 to 60 minutes total. Rushing it on high heat scorches the tomato sugars before the okra has softened.
- Butter and seasoningThe recipe adds the butter with the cayenne and salt at the end, after the stewing. Taste as you season, since the acidity of tomatoes varies.
- Serving and keepingThe title places it with cold meat; the recipe itself says nothing about serving temperature. Keep it covered in the refrigerator and use it up within a few days: it is not a preserve and should not be sealed in jars.
Okra travelled to the Americas with the transatlantic slave trade and took firm hold in the kitchens of the South, where it appears in gumbo, in stews with corn and tomatoes, and in relishes of exactly this kind. The pairing with tomato is close to universal wherever okra is grown, from West Africa through the eastern Mediterranean to the Gulf Coast, and the combination is practical as much as culinary: both crops ripen through the same late-summer weeks. Its filing among sauces and condiments rather than vegetables is a reminder of how much of the period table depended on cold joints from an earlier meal needing something sharp to go beside them.