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Okra Soup
Cut into pieces 2 1/2 cups okra, slice 1 onion, slice 1 carrot, slice 1 turnip, three tomatoes skinned and sliced, 1 cup beans, 1 can peas, dice 2 stalks celery and chop 3 tablespoons parsley.
Melt 3 tablespoons Crisco in a saucepan, add onion, carrot, turnip, beans, and cook 15 minutes, add okra, celery, and 5 cups water, cook slowly for 1 1/2 hours, add seasoning of salt, pepper and red pepper, tomatoes, corn and peas and simmer for 40 minutes. If too thick, thin with stock. Serve hot.
A meatless vegetable soup built on okra, from a cookbook written to demonstrate Crisco. The ingredient list and the method do not quite match, so read both before you start.
- Corn appears from nowhereThe method calls for corn in the final stage, but no corn is listed at the top. Add about a cup of kernels, fresh or frozen, or leave it out; the soup works either way.
- What kind of beans"1 cup beans" almost certainly means fresh green beans cut into short lengths, since they go in raw at the start with the root vegetables. Dried beans would not soften on this schedule without soaking.
- CriscoAny neutral fat works in the same quantity: 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil, shortening or butter. The original text exists in part to sell the shortening.
- The canned peasA can of peas in this period was already fully cooked. Forty minutes more turns them to paste; stir them in during the last five minutes instead, along with the corn if using frozen.
- Okra and thickeningOkra releases its mucilage over a long simmer, which is the point here. If you want less body, acid is commonly said to restrain it, so you could add the tomatoes earlier, or cook the okra a shorter time.
- Red pepperMeans cayenne. An eighth of a teaspoon is noticeable in five cups of liquid; start there.
- Total time and yieldJust over two hours of simmering. Yield is hard to pin down: 5 cups of water plus the vegetables makes a large, thick pot, probably eight cups or more once reduced, enough for six or so as a first course. Salt only at the end if you are thinning with a commercial stock.
Okra soup came to American cooking through the Atlantic slave trade; okra itself is African, and the plant's West African names survive in "gumbo," generally traced to a Bantu word for the pod. By the nineteenth century a vegetable okra soup, usually stiffened with tomatoes and often with beef, appeared in Southern manuscript and printed cookbooks alike. This version is stripped of meat and printed in a manufacturer's cookbook: Crisco was introduced in 1911, and the company commissioned recipe collections that put the new shortening into dishes cooks already knew, which is why this soup here begins by melting three tablespoons of it in a saucepan.