Oyster Gumbo
1 pint oysters 1/2 can okra 4 cups Fish Stock 1/3 can tomatoes 1/4 cup butter Salt 1 tablespoon chopped onion Pepper Clean, pick over, and parboil oysters; drain, and add oyster liquor to Fish Stock. Cook onion five minutes in one-half the butter; add to stock. Then add okra, tomatoes heated and drained from some of their liquor, oysters, and remaining butter. Season with salt and pepper.
Fish Stock is the liquor obtained by covering the head, tail, skin, bones, and small quantity of flesh adhering to bones of fish, with cold water, bringing slowly to boiling-point, simmering thirty minutes, and straining.
A thin, brothy gumbo in the New England manner — no roux, no filé, and a fish stock built from trimmings. The whole dish comes together in under fifteen minutes once the stock is made, so read it as an assembly job rather than a long simmer.
- Parboil means seconds, not minutesOysters need only to be brought just to the point where their edges ruffle — under two minutes in their own liquor. Held longer, or reheated hard after being added to the stock, they tighten into rubber. Add them at the very end and let the heat of the soup finish them.
- Save every drop of liquorThe oyster liquor is the seasoning here; strain it through a fine sieve to catch shell grit and add all of it to the stock. Without it the soup tastes of little but fish bones and tomato.
- "1/2 can okra" and "1/3 can tomatoes"Can sizes were not standardised in this period, so these are genuinely ambiguous. Reasonable modern equivalents are about 1 cup drained cut okra and about 3/4 cup canned tomatoes with much of their juice poured off. Frozen cut okra works and holds its shape better than canned.
- Fish stockThe 30-minute simmer given is right and there is little reason to exceed it; long-simmered fish bones are widely held to turn bitter, though the point at which that happens is not fixed. Use heads, frames and skin from lean white fish (cod, haddock, snapper); salmon, mackerel and other oily fish make the stock rank. Skim the scum that rises as it comes to the boil.
- Butter in two additionsHalf sweats the onion; the remainder goes in at the end with the okra, tomatoes and oysters. Stir it in gently rather than letting the pot boil hard again.
- Not a Louisiana gumboThere is no roux and no filé, so do not expect thickness. If you want it heavier, reduce the stock before assembling rather than adding flour, which would flatten the flavour.
- SeasoningSalt last — oyster liquor and canned tomatoes both bring their own. Cayenne rather than black pepper brings it closer to what the name promises.
- YieldAbout 7 cups, serving six as a first course or three or four as a light supper with bread.
This is gumbo as understood in a Boston cooking school rather than in New Orleans: okra and tomato from tins, oysters from the Atlantic coast, and none of the roux, filé or long-simmered aromatics that define the Creole dish. Household manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took the word gumbo — generally traced to a West African term for okra, which reached American English through the Gulf South — and applied it to almost any soup containing okra. The recipe also shows the period's thrift with fish: the stock is made from the head, tail, skin and bones that a fishmonger would otherwise discard, a habit that faded once fish arrived at the market already filleted. Oysters, meanwhile, were still cheap and abundant enough in the Northeast to be treated as a soup ingredient rather than a luxury.