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Okra Soup (Take two chickens three strips)
Take two chickens, three strips of sweet bacon, or a quarter of a pound of ham, one quart of tomatoes, four pints of okra and two onions. Fry the chicken, bacon and onions in a skillet. When done, pour on water and rinse into the soup-kettle, with plenty of water; put in the tomatoes. Cook the okra in a sauce-pan. When the meat has cooked so it may be pulled from the bone, pour through a colander, add the bacon or ham, and the tomatoes from the colander; put back the soup again to boil, pull the chicken from the bone, add the okra and let it cook until thick enough. If the chicken is chopped fine before being put in, and the whole stewed down pretty thick and ladled upon rice, boiled just so the grains are separate and distinct, it makes an excellent gumbo, which is still better if a little sweet cream is added to the boiling rice, and the soup seasoned with cayenne pepper, black pepper and salt. But it is generally made by adding the rice and cream to the soup.
A full-sized Southern okra soup written for a household pot: two whole chickens and four pints of okra will feed ten to twelve. The instructions assume you know when to stop, so the notes below fill in the numbers the original leaves out.
- Okra cooked apartOne notable instruction is cooking the okra in its own saucepan rather than in the broth, then adding it near the end; this may limit how far the mucilage spreads through the kettle.
- Scale it downHalve everything for a household of four: one 3–4 lb chicken, one 14.5 oz can of tomatoes, one onion, two pints of okra. The full recipe wants an 8-quart pot or larger.
- "Sweet bacon"In nineteenth-century usage "sweet" most often meant fresh and unrancid, and it may also point to a mild, lightly cured side pork rather than the heavily smoked bacon common now. A quarter pound of pancetta or a piece of fresh salt pork is one reading of the intent; ordinary bacon works but pushes the soup smoky.
- Four pints of okraA volume measure of sliced pods, roughly 2 lb fresh, or two 16 oz bags of frozen cut okra. Frozen is acceptable here since it is cooked to softness anyway.
- One quart of tomatoesHome-canned tomatoes with their liquid, so about two 14.5 oz cans, or 2 lb of fresh tomatoes peeled and chopped. "The tomatoes from the colander" means returning the tomatoes held back by the colander to the pot; the recipe does not say to press pulp through or to discard skins and seeds.
- What the colander step is doingWhen the chicken pulls from the bone, the whole pot is strained: the broth goes back to the kettle, the solids are picked over, bones and skin discarded, and the meat, pork and tomato pulp returned. It is a filtering step, not a purée.
- TimingBrown the chicken and onions 10–12 minutes, simmer the covered pot 60–75 minutes until the meat loosens, then reduce with the okra another 30–45 minutes for soup, longer for the thick gumbo version.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper appear only in the last sentence, as though an afterthought. Salt the broth as it simmers rather than at the end, and add the cayenne toward the finish so its heat can be judged.
- The rice and creamTwo options are offered: ladle the thickened stew over separate-grained rice, or stir cooked rice and a little cream into the pot. The second turns it into a thick one-dish supper and is what the author says was usual. Add cream off a hard boil so it does not break.
Okra soup of this kind — chicken or beef, tomatoes, okra, a piece of cured pork — was a fixture of Lowcountry and coastal Southern cooking before it reached general-audience compilations like this one, and okra itself came to the American South through the West African plant trade of the slavery era; the word gumbo is generally traced to Bantu terms for the pod. What is interesting about this version is the author's uncertainty about what to call it: the same pot is a soup, then a gumbo, depending on how far it is reduced and whether the rice goes under it or into it. There is no roux and no filé here, which suggests a plainer strain than the Louisiana line.