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Gumbo Soup (Prepare two good-sized)
Prepare two good-sized chickens as for a fricassee; flour the chickens and fry in butter until a light brown. Put the chickens in a soup pot, and pour over them three quarts of hot water, allowing the whole to simmer slowly for two hours. Braid a little flour and butter together for thickening; and salt to suit the taste. After straining three pints of oysters, add the juice to the soup; also a few slices of cold ham. Let the contents boil gently for ten or twelve minutes. Just before removing the soup from the fire, stir into it two spoonfuls of powdered sassafras leaves. Leave it on the fire to simmer a few minutes, then add the oysters. Season with pepper, serve in deep dish and garnish with rice.
CHAPTER VII.
A Creole-style chicken and oyster gumbo of the older, roux-light sort, thickened with flour-and-butter and finished with filé. Two details in the original will ruin it if followed literally: the filé timing and the oyster timing.
- Filé must not boil"Powdered sassafras leaves" is filé powder, sold in the spice aisle. Once it boils it turns the broth slick and ropy, so take the pot off the heat before stirring it in and do not return it to a simmer. What the original means by "two spoonfuls" is not fixed -- a period spoonful was as often a tablespoon as a teaspoon -- so start with a couple of teaspoons for three quarts and pass more at the table.
- Oysters need two minutes, not tenOysters go in last -- The ten to twelve minutes here applies to the oyster liquor and ham, before the oysters themselves go in; the original gives no time for the oysters. Add the drained oysters at the very end and let them stand in the hot soup only until the edges ruffle, about two minutes. Longer and they shrink to rubber.
- "Braid" a little flour and butterThis is beurre manié: equal weights of soft butter and flour kneaded to a paste, then whisked into the hot liquid in small pieces. About 2 tablespoons each is right for three quarts of a soup meant to be brothy rather than stewlike.
- Chickens "as for a fricassee"Cut into eight or ten serving pieces, skin on, joints and back included for body. Table fowl of the period generally ran smaller than today's; two 3 to 4 lb chickens will stand in, or halve the whole recipe and use one.
- MeasuresThree quarts of water is 12 cups; three pints of shucked oysters is about 6 cups, and since the original strains them the drained weight is well short of that. Either way it is generous for a soup and can be cut to a pint without loss. What a "spoonful" means here is not fixed; for a strong-flavoured powder like filé, err on the small side.
- Bone the chicken before servingThe original leaves the pieces whole. After the two-hour simmer, lift them out, pull the meat from the bones in large shreds, and return it. The bones contribute nothing further and make the soup awkward in a deep dish.
- The ham"A few slices of cold ham" means leftover boiled or baked ham, diced. A few ounces of a salty dry-cured ham or a piece of smoked hock works; add the salt only after the ham has been in the pot.
- Rice garnish and yieldRice is cooked separately and spooned into the bowl, not boiled in the soup. As written this serves ten to twelve as a first course, or six to eight as a meal.
Fil he the the older branch of the dish, and it shows its Louisiana ancestry plainly: the powdered sassafras leaf came from the Choctaw, who dried and pounded young leaves as a thickener, and it was traded into New Orleans markets by Native women well into the twentieth century. "Gumbo" itself is generally traced to a West African word for okra, and cooks are often said to have used one thickener or the other by season, okra in summer, fil he a general-purpose national household book like this one includes a chicken-and-oyster gumbo among its plain soups shows how far the dish had travelled. Note that fil he leaf; the safrole-bearing root bark once used for sassafras tea is a different matter entirely.