Fried Gumbo
Cut up two young chickens, and fry in skillet; when brown but not scorched, put in a pot with one quart finely chopped okra, four large tomatoes, and two onions chopped fine; cover with boiling water, boil very slowly, and keep the kettle tightly closed; add boiling water as it wastes, and simmer slowly three hours; season with salt, pepper, and a little butter and flour rubbed together; serve with boiled rice. - Mrs. J. H. S.
A plain chicken-and-okra stew from the Ohio Valley, thickened by the okra itself rather than by roux or filé. It needs almost nothing but time and a tight lid.
- The hinge: keep it covered and barely bubblingThe recipe insists twice on slow heat and a tightly closed kettle, and it means it. Okra held at a hard boil breaks down into stringy threads and the tomatoes catch on the bottom; a bare shiver of movement for the whole cook keeps the body silky.
- Two young chickensNineteenth-century "young chickens" were small birds, roughly 2 to 2.5 lb each. One 4 to 5 lb chicken cut into eight or ten pieces is the practical substitute.
- Three hours is long for modern birdsFarm chickens of the 1870s had working muscles and could stand it. Supermarket chicken will fall off the bone in about 90 minutes; check at that point and pull the breast pieces early if they are drying out, returning them at the end.
- A quart of okraMeasured chopped, that is roughly 1 to 1.25 lb of fresh pods trimmed and sliced. Frozen cut okra works and needs no thawing, though it releases more liquid.
- Four large tomatoesFigure about 1.5 lb, peeled and chopped, or a 28 oz can with its juice out of season.
- Butter and flour rubbed togetherThis is beurre manié, equal parts by volume worked to a paste. Add it in small pinches to the simmering pot at the end and give it a few minutes to cook out the raw flour taste. Two tablespoons of each is plenty for a pot this size.
- Skillet browningBrown the chicken in batches in a little fat, and deglaze the skillet with some of the boiling water so the fond goes into the pot.
- YieldServes six to eight over rice. Salt is added only at the end here, as the recipe directs.
Buckeye Cookery was first published in Marysville, Ohio, in 1877, with later editions issued from Minneapolis, and its gumbo entries show the dish traveling well north of the Gulf. This is a Creole idea filtered through a Midwestern church-supper kitchen: no roux, no file, no shellfish, no bay or cayenne, just chicken, okra, tomato and onion cooked down and served over rice. The word gumbo is generally traced to a West African term for okra, and okra is doing all the thickening here, which is the older and more African of the two thickening traditions; file, the Choctaw contribution of powdered sassafras leaf, does not appear. The "fried" in the title appears to distinguish it from the book's other gumbos by the initial browning of the chicken. The attribution to initials only, "Mrs. J. H. S.", is typical of the book, which was assembled from contributions by many housekeepers.