Gumbo
Slice a large onion and put it with a slice of bacon or fat ham into a skillet and brown it; skin and cut up two quarts tomatoes, cut thin one quart okra, put all together with a little parsley into a stew-kettle, adding about three quarts water, and cook slowly two or three hours, adding salt and pepper to taste. -Mrs. E. A. W.
A vegetable gumbo in the older, simpler sense: okra and tomatoes stewed long enough to thicken themselves. No roux, no filé, no shellfish.
- YieldThree quarts of water plus two quarts of tomatoes reduces to roughly 3 to 3 1/2 quarts of soup, serving eight to ten. Halve it comfortably in a 5-quart pot.
- The hinge is the reductionThe body of this soup comes from the okra breaking down and the tomato water cooking away. The recipe does not say whether to cover the pot; leaving it uncovered or barely covered at a bare simmer will thicken it, while a tight lid will leave it thinner.
- Okra, cut thinOne quart of okra sliced in thin rounds is roughly 1 lb fresh, trimmed. Frozen cut okra works and needs no thawing. The sliminess that bothers people largely disperses over long cooking with acid tomato, which is what is happening here.
- TomatoesTwo quarts skinned and cut up is about 4 lb fresh, or two 28-oz cans with their juice. Canned are the better choice outside high summer; reduce the added water to about 2 quarts if using canned, since they carry more liquid than trimmed fresh.
- Bacon or fat ham"A slice" is unquantified; a thick slab of 3 to 4 oz is a reasonable reading. Dice it, render it, and brown the sliced onion in the fat rather than adding oil.
- Cooking timeTwo hours at a slow simmer is enough; three deepens it. Stir up from the bottom every half hour once it thickens, as reduced okra and tomato scorch readily.
- SeasoningThe recipe leaves salt and pepper to taste; salting near the end, after the volume has dropped, gives more control. Cayenne in place of black pepper and a splash of vinegar at the finish are optional departures from the text.
Gumbo entered American cookbooks from Louisiana, and the word itself is generally traced to Bantu terms for okra — ki ngombo — which is why the vegetable and the soup share a name. This Ohio version, contributed by a reader initialed only "Mrs. E. A. W.", has none of the roux, filé powder, shrimp and crab or Creole spicing of Louisiana gumbo, leaving the two ingredients a Midwestern kitchen could readily get. Buckeye Cookery (1877) was assembled largely from the contributions of Ohio housewives. Okra appears here even though it still read as a distinctly Southern vegetable, and long stewing with tomato was one common way of handling it.