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Gumbo Soup
½ lb. sliced ham 1 quart okra I chicken ¼ lb. chopped bacon 2 onions 1 tablespoonful chopped pars- I garlic clove ley 1 tablespoonful flour I head celery 2 tablespoonfuls melted 3 pints (6 cups) strained stock butter 1 pint (2 cups) plain boiled 1 quart tomatoes rice Salt and pepper Chop the onions and the garlic, roll them in the flour, then brown them in the butter, and add the tomatoes. Cut the heads off the okra, split each four times and cut into dice, add it to the tomatoes in the casserole, add the parsley, salt and pepper, and the celery, bacon, and ham chopped; brown all together.
Cut up the chicken and fry it for a few minutes, then add it with the stock, and simmer until thick.
Serve with plain boiled rice. One pint of cooked crab meat, cooked shrimps, or oysters, may be added with the chicken if liked. 1/2 lb. (I cup) lentils 3 stalks celery 4 springs parsley I onion
A Creole-style gumbo adapted for the covered stewpan, thickened by long simmering rather than by roux or filé. The ingredient column runs in two streams and needs untangling before you shop.
- Reading the quantitiesThe capital "I" throughout stands for the numeral 1: 1 quart okra, 1 chicken, 1 garlic clove, 1 head celery. "14 lb. chopped bacon" is a quarter pound. The full list is 1½ lb sliced ham, ¼ lb bacon, 1 chicken, 1 quart okra, 1 quart tomatoes, 2 onions, 1 garlic clove, 1 head celery, 1 tbsp parsley, 1 tbsp flour, 2 tbsp melted butter, 6 cups strained stock, 2 cups boiled rice, salt and pepper.
- What "casserole" means hereThe recipe browns and simmers everything in the one vessel over direct heat, so the casserole is a lidded flameproof pot rather than an oven dish. A 6- to 8-quart Dutch oven does the same work; everything from browning the onions to the final simmer happens in the one pot.
- The chickenA period "chicken" for soup was often an older fowl of 4-5 lb that could stand an hour or more of simmering. A modern 4 lb bird, cut into eight or ten pieces, is done in 40-50 minutes; pull the breast pieces early and return them at the end so they do not shred to threads.
- Okra and the hinge of the dishCutting the pods into dice releases the mucilage that thickens the pot, which is the point. Brown the okra with the tomatoes and vegetables until it stops looking slick, then let the finished soup simmer uncovered so it reduces; "simmer until thick" means roughly an hour, not a fixed clock time.
- TomatoesA quart of tomatoes at this date would most often have been home-canned, with their liquid, though fresh would serve in season. Two 14-15 oz tins, roughly chopped, juice included, comes close to the equivalent.
- SaltBetween 1½ lb ham, ¼ lb bacon and 6 cups of stock, the pot carries a great deal of salt already. Season only at the end.
- The shellfish variationIf you add the optional pint of crab, shrimp or oysters, put it in during the last few minutes rather than "with the chicken." Shrimp need two or three minutes and oysters only until their edges curl; a long simmer turns both to rubber.
- ServingMade in full it feeds eight to ten. The rice is cooked separately and spooned into the bowl, with the gumbo ladled over it.
Gumbo reached the general American cookbook from Louisiana, where West African, French and Native American cooking met; the name is often traced, by a favoured tradition rather than settled fact, to a Bantu word such as kingombo for okra, and okra is the thickener at work here. Cooks in New Orleans thickened gumbo in three broad ways -- with a dark roux, with powdered sassafras leaf, or with okra itself -- and this version takes the okra route. Its appearance in a casserole-cookery book reflects a fashion of the early twentieth century for one-pot dishes cooked and sometimes served in the same covered vessel, promoted as economical of both fuel and washing-up. The generous ham and bacon, and the offhand suggestion that a pint of crab or oysters might be thrown in, belong to a period when both were cheap enough to treat as an afterthought.