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Gumbo Soup (Cut up in small pieces four)
Cut up in small pieces four squirrels and one chicken, cook until the flesh falls from the bones. To each gallon of soup add a handful of green or dried sassafras buds, put in a bag. One quart of okra, one large onion cut fine, half dozen medium-sized Irish potatoes cut in cubes, one carrot grated, and a small quantity of cabbage. Season with pepper and salt. When the soup is done take out the bag, and, after removing the buds, squeeze the bag into the soup. Add red pepper and thicken with browned flour.
A camp-and-farmhouse gumbo built on small game rather than seafood, written for cooks who kept a pot going all afternoon. A few of its terms and quantities need translating before it will work on a modern stove.
- Sassafras is the hingeThe bag of sassafras buds gives the soup its gumbo character and its body, and it should never be boiled hard. Steep it in soup that is barely trembling for the last stretch of cooking; sustained boiling turns sassafras thickening stringy and slightly slimy, which is the same reason filé powder is stirred into gumbo off the heat.
- Buds, not rootThe recipe calls for green leaf buds; filé powder, the familiar substitute, is ground from dried sassafras leaves rather than buds, and will do much the same work here. Sassafras root and root bark are a different matter, being high in safrole, and are no longer permitted as a food flavouring in the United States. If you cannot find fresh buds, a tablespoon or two of filé per gallon, stirred in after the pot leaves the burner, is the practical stand-in.
- SquirrelFour squirrels give roughly the meat of one small chicken, so the pot is about half game and half poultry. Buy from a licensed game dealer or a hunter you trust, handle raw wild rabbit and squirrel with gloves as a precaution against tularemia, and cook the meat through until it slips from the bone, which takes about two hours at a low simmer. Two pounds of dark chicken meat or a rabbit substitutes cleanly.
- Irish potatoesSimply ordinary white potatoes, distinguished in nineteenth-century books from sweet potatoes. Half a dozen medium ones is about two pounds. Add them in the last thirty minutes or they collapse into the broth.
- Okra quantityA quart of okra is roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter of pods, trimmed and sliced. Frozen cut okra will work if fresh is unavailable.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a heavy pan until it is the color of cinnamon, then whisked with a little cool broth before it goes in. Start with a third of a cup per gallon. It thickens far less than an equal weight of raw flour because the toasting breaks down some of the starch.
- Volume and yieldThe sassafras is measured against the volume of soup rather than the other ingredients: a handful to each gallon. The remaining vegetables are given as fixed amounts, and the recipe never states how much water goes in or how much soup it makes, so scale the sassafras to whatever your pot holds.
- Pepper twicePepper and salt go in with the vegetables and red pepper at the end. Whatever the original intent, adding cayenne late does keep its sharpness, where an hour's simmering flattens it into a dull background heat.
Gumbo reached American cookbooks from two directions at once, and both are visible in this pot. The word is generally traced to a West African term for okra, and okra came to the South with enslaved Africans; the sassafras thickening is Choctaw practice, adopted by Louisiana cooks as filé. What makes this version a country recipe rather than a New Orleans one is the meat. Squirrel was cheap and plentiful game in the wooded Upper South and the Ohio Valley, and it turns up in the same regional pots as burgoo and Brunswick stew.