Creole Gumbo
Into a saucepan put a lump of butter, or lard, and some small pieces of bacon, chopped fine. After the bacon is browned, slice in okra, very fine; then stir constantly, adding hot water by degrees. To this add crab and shrimp, cut very fine, and a small piece of ham if desized. If you have not crab or shrimp, use chicken and veal or beef. Served with boiled rice. -Madame Laura.
The recipe assumes you already know what gumbo should look like, so the quantities and the timing are left entirely to the cook. Here is what the shorthand is hiding.
- The hinge: cook the okra downOkra sliced thin and stirred constantly with fat is being deliberately cooked past its slimy stage — the mucilage breaks down and turns into body. Give it 15-20 minutes over medium heat, stirring, until it stops roping and the strands disappear. Adding water too early interrupts this, which may be part of why the water goes in "by degrees."
- "A lump of butter"Read it as 2-3 tablespoons. With the fat rendering from the bacon you will have plenty; too much and the finished gumbo goes greasy.
- Quantities to work fromFor 4 to 6 servings: 4 oz bacon, 1 lb okra, 1 lb shrimp, the picked meat of two crabs or about 8 oz lump crab, 4 oz ham, and 6-7 cups hot water or shellfish stock added gradually.
- Shellfish timingCrab and shrimp go in at the end, not with the okra. Shrimp need 2-3 minutes in the simmering pot; crab meat needs only to heat through. Long simmering makes seafood rubbery.
- Seasoning is unstatedNo salt, pepper or aromatics appear in the text. Salt to taste, and onion, garlic, a bay leaf and cayenne are all consistent with the style.
- No roux hereThis is an okra gumbo, thickened by the pod rather than by browned flour, and there is no filé. If you add filé off the heat as a finish, never let it boil — it turns the pot stringy.
- The substitution clauseChicken with veal or beef needs far longer than shellfish. Brown the meat with the bacon and simmer it until tender before the okra work, or you will overcook the okra waiting on the meat.
- ServingBoiled rice, cooked separately. The consistency here, thinned with water by degrees, is closer to a soup than to a thick stew.
Okra gumbo of this kind is the older and plainer branch of the dish: West African okra, brought into Louisiana kitchens through the slave trade, doing the thickening work that browned flour or Choctaw filé powder does in other versions — the word gumbo itself is generally traced to Bantu terms for okra, such as ki ngombo. What is notable is where it sits. Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American community cookbooks were compiled from contributions, so a page of Midwestern boiled dinners and cream soups could acquire a Creole recipe from a single subscriber. "Madame Laura" is credited but not otherwise identified, and no measurements are given.