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Okra with Tomatoes
1 tablespoonful of butter, 1 pint of tomatoes, Salt and pepper to taste.
Wash the okra, cut it into thin slices; scald and peel the tomatoes and cut them into small pieces. Put the butter in a porcelain or granite kettle, add a teaspoonful of salt, cover the kettle and simmer gently half an hour. Then add the butter and serve very hot.
1 quart of okra,
The text as printed has been scrambled in typesetting: the ingredient list runs on at the end, the butter is called for twice, and the okra is never actually added to the pot. Read it as one quart okra, one pint tomatoes, one tablespoon butter, salt and pepper, with the okra and tomatoes going into the kettle together and the butter stirred in at the end.
- The quantitiesA quart of sliced okra is roughly 1 lb of pods; a pint of tomatoes is about 1 lb of fresh tomatoes, scalded and peeled, or a standard 14-15 oz can drained of its thinnest juice. The proportion of two parts okra to one part tomato by volume is what makes this a vegetable dish rather than a sauce.
- Porcelain or granite kettleBoth refer to enamelled ware: a steel or iron body with a vitreous enamel lining. The instruction is not decorative: okra and tomatoes are acidic enough to pick up metallic flavour and a grey-green cast from bare iron. Any enamelled, stainless or nonstick pan works.
- The half hour is deliberateModern cooks are often told to keep okra brief and hot to limit the mucilage. A different approach is at work here: long contact with tomato acid over gentle heat tends to leave the dish thickened rather than slippery.
- Slice thinThin rounds expose the seed chambers so the mucilage disperses into the tomato. Thickly cut pieces will not break down as readily over the same half hour.
- LiquidFresh tomatoes and okra give up enough water to make their own braising liquid once covered, but check after ten minutes. If the pan is drying, add a few tablespoons of water rather than raising the heat.
- Butter at the endThe tablespoon reads as finishing butter, stirred into the hot vegetables so it enriches the juices. Added at the start, as the garbled text implies, it loses that effect.
- YieldServes four as a side dish. Season at the end as well as the beginning: the teaspoon of salt called for goes in early to draw moisture, and the pepper is better added just before serving.
Okra travelled to the Americas with the transatlantic slave trade, and its English name descends from West African languages of the Niger delta, generally traced to Igbo okuru; the parallel term gumbo comes from a Bantu root for the same pod. Cooked with tomatoes it became a staple of the American South and the Gulf, and it appears in cookbooks like this one as an unremarkable vegetable rather than a regional curiosity. Books of this type, aimed at general household cooks, were where such dishes made the crossing from regional kitchens into the national repertoire.