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Okra with Rice
1 quart of okra, 1 red pepper, 1 onion, 3 good-sized tomatoes or a pint of stewed tomatoes, I red pepper, 1 cup of rice, 1 pint of stock, I onion, 1 tablespoonful of powdered, dry sassafras leaves (gumbo fillet powder), 1/2 pound of ham.
Wash the okra, cut it into slices. Cut the ham into dice and fry it brown. Peel and cut the tomatoes, put them in a porcelain kettle with the okra, ham, stock, pepper and onion cut into slices. If you can get for this a ginny pepper the dish will be greatly improved. Cover the kettle and simmer gently thirty minutes. While this is cooking, wash and boil the rice. When the okra is done, arrange
A gumbo in all but name, thickened with filé and served over rice rather than in it. Two things need attention before you start: the ingredient list never says how much okra to use, and the text breaks off mid-sentence at the serving step.
- The filé is the hingeSassafras leaf powder must never boil. Stir it in off the heat once the pot is done, or the dish turns ropy and stringy in the way filé is notorious for. The recipe lists it but never tells you when to add it; this is the moment.
- Missing quantityOkra is the title ingredient and no amount is given. For a pint of tomatoes and a pint of stock, about 1 lb of fresh pods, trimmed and sliced into rounds, is in proportion. Frozen sliced okra can be substituted.
- Ginny pepperAn old spelling of guinea pepper; in American cookery of this period the name generally meant a small hot chile of African-derived stock, though the same name was also used for grains of paradise. A bird's eye or a cayenne is the closest thing. The "1 red pepper" of the main list appears to be a sweet red pepper; the ginny pepper is the upgrade.
- Porcelain kettleA cast-iron pot with a white enamel lining, used so acidic tomatoes would not react with bare iron. Any enameled Dutch oven or stainless pot does the same job.
- MeasuresA pint of stock is 2 cups; a pint of stewed tomatoes is likewise 2 cups, or roughly one 15 oz can with its liquid.
- The hamHalf a pound of a firm, salty smoked ham cut into dice. Modern wet-cured deli ham will go soft and add water; a ham hock's worth of country ham or a thick-cut smoked gammon steak is nearer the intent. Salt the pot only at the end.
- TimingThirty minutes of gentle simmering suits sliced okra, and slow cooking does reduce its slipperiness somewhat. Keep it at a bare simmer rather than a hard boil, which breaks the pods up.
- The lost endingThe instruction stops at "arrange." The likely finish is a ring or bed of the boiled rice with the okra stew spooned into the centre. Probably enough for four.
Okra came to the American South through the Atlantic slave trade from West Africa, where the plant and several of its names originate; "gumbo" is generally traced to a Bantu word for the pod. Sassafras leaf powder, the other thickener here, came from a different direction entirely, adopted from the Choctaw of the Gulf Coast, and the French Louisiana kitchen is where the two met. That this dish sits in a general vegetable book rather than a Creole one suggests how far filé powder may have travelled by the turn of the twentieth century, with the spelling in the recipe already drifting. The recipe's habit of building a vegetable dish on diced ham and stock seems thoroughly of its period, when vegetables were often not left to stand alone on the table.