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Okra
Pick tender okra and boil in salted water. Drain well, add a large tablespoonful of butter, half cup of cream, salt and pepper to the taste, and serve hot.
A bare-bones treatment that assumes the cook knows okra. The instructions omit quantity, cut and cooking time, all of which matter here.
- Quantity and yieldA tablespoon of butter and half a cup of cream will dress roughly 1 to 1.5 lb of okra, serving four as a side. Scale the cream down if you want the pods coated rather than swimming.
- "Tender okra" means smallPods of 2 to 3 inches are what the recipe wants. Anything longer has woody ribs and fibrous seed that no amount of boiling will soften.
- Leave the pods wholeThe mucilage that makes okra slippery is released when the pods are cut. Boiling them whole, with the stem end trimmed but not sliced into the seed cavity, keeps the texture clean. The recipe does not say either way, so this is an inference rather than an instruction.
- Boiling timeFive to eight minutes in well-salted water is enough for small pods. Period cookbooks often ran vegetables twenty minutes or more, which turns okra to grey slime.
- Drain thoroughly"Drain well" is the hinge. Okra holds water in its ridges, and any that remains will thin the cream into a watery pool. Tip the pods out onto a towel for a minute before saucing.
- The creamUse heavy cream. Nineteenth-century "cream" was unhomogenised and fatty; modern light cream or half-and-half can break when it hits hot, salted vegetables.
- FinishingWarm the butter and cream together in the empty pan, return the okra, and turn it over the heat only long enough to coat. Prolonged simmering in the cream draws out more mucilage.
Okra came to North America with the transatlantic slave trade from West Africa, where it had long been a staple thickener and pot herb; the English name is generally traced to Igbo okuru, while the alternative "gumbo" is usually derived from Western Bantu words for the plant. In American cookbooks it stayed largely a Southern vegetable well into the twentieth century, usually appearing in gumbos, stewed with tomatoes, or fried in cornmeal. A plain buttered-and-creamed treatment like this one presents the pods much as the same volume would present peas or asparagus.