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Beef Soup with Okra
Fry one pound "round" steak cut in bits, two table-spoons butter, and one sliced onion, till very brown; add to three or four quarts cold water in soup-kettle, and boil slowly one hour; then add pint sliced okra, and simmer three hours or more; season with salt and pepper, strain and serve. - Mrs. T. B. J., Tuscumbia, Ala.
A long-simmered clear broth rather than a stew: everything in the pot is there to flavor the liquid, and it all gets strained out at the end. Two things need attention — how dark you take the meat and onion, and how much liquid you lose over four hours.
- Brown it properly"Till very brown" is the whole flavor of this soup, since the solids are discarded at the end. Take the steak, butter and onion well past golden to a deep mahogany with dark fond on the pan bottom, then deglaze with a little of the cold water so none of it is wasted.
- Cold water, and a lot of itThree to four quarts against one pound of meat is a thin ratio by design. Over four hours of simmering you will lose a quart or more to evaporation; keep the lid ajar rather than clamped down, and expect to finish with roughly two to three quarts.
- A pint of okraMeasured as sliced volume, a pint is two cups, roughly 7 ounces of fresh pods, trimmed and cut into rounds. Frozen cut okra works and needs no thawing.
- Three hours of okra is not a mistakeModern cooks are taught to cook okra briefly to keep it from going ropy. Here the ropiness is the point: the mucilage dissolves into the broth and gives it body, and the spent pods are strained out. Do not shorten this step expecting a better texture.
- Simmer, do not boil"Boil slowly" in nineteenth-century usage generally means bare bubbles at the surface. A hard boil will emulsify fat into the liquid and cloud a soup that is going to be strained.
- Season at the endSalt and pepper go in after the reduction is finished, as the recipe indicates. Salting at the start of a soup that loses a third of its volume will leave it harsh.
- StrainingA fine sieve gives the clear broth intended. If you would rather eat the meat, lift out the beef before it disintegrates at the one-hour mark and return it to the strained soup.
- YieldEight to twelve servings as a first course, on the 2-3 quarts estimated above. Chill overnight and lift the hardened fat off the top if you want it leaner.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was compiled in Ohio in the 1870s from contributions sent in largely by Midwestern women, with correspondents elsewhere, and the initials-and-town signature here — Mrs. T. B. J. of Tuscumbia, Alabama — is how the book credited them. That a northern compilation carries a Gulf South okra soup is itself worth noting: okra reached the Americas from West Africa through the slave trade, and the word is generally traced to Igbo ọkụrụ, while gumbo is usually connected to Bantu terms such as kingombo. By the late nineteenth century okra was a standard summer vegetable across the South and had begun appearing in national cookbooks — pickled, stewed and fried as well as in soups, where its thickening quality was the point rather than a fault. The method — browning meat hard, extracting it into a large volume of water, then straining everything away — draws on the French stock tradition, one strand of the mixed English and French inheritance in American cookbook writing of the period.