Gumbo Soup
1 fried chicken. 1 quart okra, cut up. 1 onion. 1bunch parsley. Few celery tops-fry all together. Put in one quart skinned tomatoes. 1½ gallons water, boil to 1/2 gallon.
Teacup of wine after taking from the fire.--Mrs. R. A. Gumbo Soup.
Fry two fowls, old or young, with parsley, pepper, salt, onion, lard or bacon. Put it in the pot with water sufficient for the soup. One quart sliced okra, scrap of ham or fried sausage to boil with it.
Sassafras Gumbo is made in the same way, except after the fowl has boiled until the flesh has left the bone, just before taking off the fire, stir in one tablespoonful sassafras flour. Oysters are a great improvement to sassafras gumbo. Gather the sassafras leaves green, and dry in the shade, as sage; when thoroughly dry, rub through a sieve and bottle and cork tightly. It is nice in beef soup instead of okra.--Mrs. T.
Two related gumbos from the same page: an okra-thickened version and a sassafras (filé) version. Both start by frying the bird, and both depend on a long reduction rather than a roux.
- The hinge: never boil the filéSassafras flour is stirred in off the heat, or at the very edge of it, exactly as written. Boiled filé turns the pot stringy and ropy, and the flavour goes flat. Add it with the pot pulled aside and serve within a few minutes.
- "Sassafras flour" is filé powder"Sassafras flour" is file powder -- Sold in the spice aisle under that name. The leaf is the traditional culinary part; the safrole worries that led to sassafras oil, and later root bark, being restricted from food use from 1960 onward concern the root, not dried leaf powder. Mrs. T. gives no volume for her pot, but a tablespoon to roughly half a gallon of soup is a reasonable ratio.
- Volumes and reductionA gallon and a half down to half a gallon is a two-thirds reduction, which at a steady simmer in a wide pot means roughly 2 to 3 hours. A teacup in period receipts is usually reckoned at somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup; the wine goes in after the pot leaves the heat, as written.
- "1 fried chicken" and "two fowls"A cut-up 3 to 4 lb bird, browned in pieces in lard or bacon fat, not deep-fried in batter. "Fowl, old or young" acknowledges a stewing hen, which no longer turns up at most markets; the instruction is simply to boil until the flesh leaves the bone, and a supermarket chicken will reach that in 60 to 90 minutes, well short of what an old hen needs.
- OkraA quart sliced is roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter fresh, or a 1 lb bag frozen cut okra. Frying it with the aromatics at the start, as the first recipe directs, cuts the mucilage; Mrs. T. boils hers in raw, which gives a slicker soup -- not wrong, just a different texture.
- OystersAdd shucked oysters with their liquor in the last two minutes, off the boil. Longer in the pot leaves them rubbery and shrunken.
- TomatoesA quart of skinned tomatoes is about a 28 oz can, used with its juice. Whole peeled crushed by hand suits this better than passata.
- Drying your own leavesIf you follow Mrs. T. and dry sassafras leaves yourself, they must be bone-dry before sieving or the powder will clump and mould in the bottle. Store in a dark cupboard and use within a year; filé loses its scent fast.
- YieldHalf a gallon of finished soup serves 8 as a first course, 5 or 6 as a main over rice.
This page carries two gumbos, two thickeners, and no roux at all. The word itself is generally traced to a West African term for okra (Bantu ki ngombo). The alternative thickener, powdered sassafras leaf, came into Creole cookery from the Choctaw; the name file, however, is French, the past participle of filer, "spun" or "stringy." That a housekeeper was expected to gather and dry her own sassafras leaves says a good deal about period provisioning: okra was a garden crop, file a hedgerow one, and much of the household spice cabinet was something you made. Mrs. T.'s closing note that the powder is "nice in beef soup instead of okra" treats it purely as a thickener.