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Okra, or Gumbo
Okra is the fruit of a West Indian plant, which is now obtainable in this country in tins. It is greenish in colour, and contains seeds not unlike pearl barley in appearance. By some it is disliked on account of its peculiar flavour, while others regard it as a great delicacy. To serve it as a vegetable, turn the contents of a tin into a lined saucepan, add a little seasoning, and boil. A flavour of tomatoes is considered a great improvement; the pulp of the fresh fruit, or tomato conserve or sauce, may be used, according to taste. Probable cost, 1s. per tin.
A short entry from the reference section, but it does give a method: heat tinned okra, season, and lift it with tomato. Two things in it need translating for a modern cook.
- Lined saucepanThis most likely means a copper pan lined with tin, the usual recommendation for acidic contents so they would not react with bare copper. Any stainless steel or enamelled pan does the same job.
- Do not boil it longTinned okra is already fully cooked and packed in liquid. Bring it through to hot over a few minutes; a hard boil collapses the pods and releases the mucilage that gives okra its reputation for sliminess.
- Tomato is doing real workThe acid in tomato cuts the mucilage as well as the flavour Cassell's calls peculiar. Add it early rather than as a garnish.
- Tomato conserveThe Victorian term covers reduced, concentrated tomato sold in jars or tins, closest to modern tomato pur u00e9e, or passata if you want it looser.
- Fresh and frozen okraBoth are widely available now; the entry's own note that okra is 'obtainable in this country in tins' suggests neither was a practical option for this book's readers in Britain. Frozen cut okra needs about five minutes; fresh whole pods, trimmed at the stem but not cut into, take eight to ten and stay less ropy than sliced.
- YieldA modern tin of okra, around 14-15 oz, serves three or four as a side; the size of tin the book had in mind is not given. The shilling is the probable retail price in Britain at the time of publication, when tinned tropical produce was an expensive import.
Cassell's calls okra "the fruit of a West Indian plant," which is where the British encountered it but not where it began: Abelmoschus esculentus is African, generally traced to the region around Ethiopia and West Africa, and it travelled to the Caribbean and the American South with the transatlantic slave trade. The alternative name in the heading gives the story away, gumbo being usually derived from a Bantu word for the plant, ki-ngombo, which is also how the Louisiana stew thickened with okra got its name. That a late-Victorian British dictionary of cookery lists okra at all is striking, and the entry's slightly wary tone, delicacy to some and disliked by others, registers the unfamiliarity of the thing.