Okra Soup
1½ gallons water. 2 quarts young okra, cut very fine. 2 quarts tomatoes. Onions, prepared as for pea soup. Pepper; salt. 1 large spoonful butter. Add the tomatoes about twelve o'clock. Put the soup on early in the morning.--Mrs. I.
A plain Southern okra soup built on volume and time: six quarts of water reduced over most of a morning. The instructions assume a wood range that was lit at dawn anyway, and a household eating its main meal in the early afternoon.
- The hinge is the reductionBeyond pepper, salt and a spoonful of butter, nothing thickens this soup but long evaporation. Six quarts of water with four quarts of vegetables need to cook down substantially before the result tastes like soup rather than okra water. Leave the lid off or ajar.
- Quantities and yield1 1/2 gallons is 6 quarts (about 5.7 litres). As written this is 20-plus servings; quartering the whole thing gives a manageable pot. A "large spoonful" of butter means a serving spoon, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons.
- "Prepared as for pea soup"A cross-reference to another page in the book, and genuinely ambiguous on its own. Period pea-soup recipes vary; onions peeled and sliced or chopped, sometimes softened in a little butter before going into the pot, is a reasonable reading. Two or three medium onions suit this volume.
- Add tomatoes late, and whyAdd tomatoes late -- the tomatoes go in at noon, hours after the okra. Acid does slow the softening of vegetables, which may be why the okra and onion get a head start; whatever the reason, the tomatoes need only an hour or two to collapse. Keep that order even on a short timeline.
- Okra cut very fineThin slices release the mucilage that gives this soup its body, which is the point rather than a fault. Use young, small pods; large ones are fibrous. Two quarts sliced is roughly 2 lb of whole pods.
- TomatoesFresh, peeled and chopped, in season. Two quarts is about 4 lb fresh, or two 28-oz cans with their juice, in which case reduce the water slightly.
- No meat is specifiedMany period Virginia and Carolina okra soups started with a shin of beef or a ham bone, and this one reads either as a meatless version or as an assumed addition. A beef shin or smoked hock added at the start, and the meat shredded back in at the end, is entirely in keeping.
- Modern timingThere is no need for six hours on a modern stove. Sweat the onions, add okra and water, simmer 45 minutes to an hour, add tomatoes and simmer another hour uncovered until reduced and thick. Salt at the end, once the volume has settled.
Okra came to the American South through the transatlantic slave trade, and the word itself derives from West African languages — okuru in Igbo is the usual citation, with the alternative name "gumbo" generally traced to Bantu ki-ngombo. By the time Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled — it was edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, and the date is usually given as 1878-79 — okra soup was standard summer cookery in Virginia and the Carolinas, and the book prints several versions contributed by different women. The book was assembled from the manuscript receipts of some 250 Virginia housekeepers, so its entries are shorthand written by cooks for cooks: a reference to "onions, prepared as for pea soup" and an instruction to start the pot early were all the detail anyone in that kitchen required. The clock in the recipe is itself a period detail — dinner was served in the mid-afternoon, so noon was the midpoint of the cooking, not the end of it.