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Gumbo and Tomatoes
Gumbo, or okra, and tomatoes may be canned together, and are found very valuable for soups. They also make a delightful scallop for the winter season. Simply cook all together and can as previously directed.
This is a canning direction rather than a dish, and it is the one category of old cookery that cannot be carried over. The vegetables themselves are unobjectionable; the preservation method is not.
- Why it fails: okra is low-acidOkra sits well above the pH 4.6 threshold that keeps Clostridium botulinum spores dormant. Adding tomatoes does not reliably pull a mixed jar down into safe territory, and tomato varieties themselves vary in acidity. A mixture of the two is treated as a low-acid product.
- Why it fails: no process specifiedThere is no jar size, no fill level, no processing temperature and no processing time — only "can as previously directed," which in books of this period generally meant open-kettle filling or a boiling-water bath. Boiling water reaches 212F, which does not destroy botulinum spores in a low-acid pack. Vegetables of this type require a pressure canner at a measured pressure for a measured time.
- If you want canned okra and tomatoesUse a current tested procedure from a food-safety extension service, which will specify jar size, headspace, pressure and time for your altitude. Do not adapt the instruction above.
- "Gumbo" means okraThe two words are used interchangeably here, as they often are in nineteenth-century American cookbooks; the name came into English from a West African word for the pod, and it did not yet belong exclusively to the Louisiana soup.
- "Scallop" is a dish, not a shellfishA scallop in this book is what we would call a gratin — vegetables layered with crumbs and butter and baked until browned. That part of the suggestion works perfectly well with fresh or frozen okra and canned tomatoes.
- Freezing is the straightforward substituteOkra and tomatoes cooked down together freeze well and keep their character for soups and gratins through the winter, which is exactly the purpose the original entry was serving.
Okra travelled to the American South through the transatlantic slave trade, and by the late nineteenth century it was so thoroughly naturalised in Southern kitchens that cookbooks used gumbo and okra as plain synonyms. The pairing with tomatoes is likely older than the recipes that record it: the two crop at the same season, and the tomato's acid and body are often said to counteract the mucilage that okra releases when cut. Home canning was expanding fast in this period, as glass jars with reusable rubber-ringed closures became cheap, and cookery writers were quick to recommend putting up summer vegetables without an understanding of which foods were acid enough for a water bath. Botulism from home-canned low-acid vegetables was a recurring and often fatal problem into the 1920s, and the pressure-canning guidance that answers it dates from the research programmes of the following decades. A breezy "can as previously directed" is the signature of the era just before that knowledge arrived.