Home › Meat And Fish Sauces › Tomato Sauce with Okra
Tomato Sauce with Okra
Make a Tomato Sauce, and when done, add a half pint of stewed okra and a quarter teaspoonful of powdered coriander seed.
A two-line addition to a sauce that appears earlier in the same section, so the whole dish depends on the tomato base you build first. The instructions assume you already have both components cooked.
- Half pint of okraThat is one cup of stewed okra. Roughly 8 oz of fresh pods, topped and sliced, cooks down to about that; you will want it fairly well drained so the sauce is not watered down.
- Stew the okra separatelyCook the pods in a little salted water or stock until just tender, 8 to 10 minutes, then drain. Boiling okra directly in the tomato sauce releases far more mucilage and makes the sauce slick and stringy.
- Choose small podsPods much over four inches tend to be tough and full of hard seed. Small, firm, bright green okra is best for stewing whole or in thick coins.
- Add the okra at the endThe sauce is finished before the okra goes in; it needs only a minute or two to heat through. Prolonged simmering after this point collapses the pods.
- CorianderA quarter teaspoon of coriander seed, which the recipe calls for powdered; it is a small amount, enough to lift the tomato without reading as curry. Pre-ground coriander that has sat in a cupboard contributes almost nothing, so grind it if you can.
- Acid helpsTomato's acidity cuts okra's viscosity. If the finished sauce feels ropy, a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar tightens it up more effectively than more cooking.
Okra came to American kitchens through the West African diaspora and the Caribbean, and by the nineteenth century it was thoroughly domesticated in Southern cooking — in gumbo, in soups, and as a stewed vegetable in its own right. Okra is a high-summer crop that peaks alongside tomatoes, and okra stewed with tomatoes was itself a long-standing Southern dish. The coriander seed is the more unusual touch, and points to the long habit in nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookbooks of borrowing single "East India" spices to season an otherwise plain sauce. Recipes of this kind were written as a one-line variation on a base sauce given a few pages earlier.