Beef Gumbo
Cut fine I large onion. Trim the fat from I 1/2 pounds of lean beef and put the meat through the chopper, then run through the tender part of the fat. Put the latter in a kettle and place over a slow fire until well tried out; skim out the scraps and drop in the onion. Cook slowly until beginning to color, then add I raw potato pared and cut in thin slices, 1 pint of fresh tomatoes measured after skinning and cutting fine, 1 pint of tender okra cut in thin slices, and the meat. Cover and cook slowly for ten minutes, stirring occasionally, then add 1 pint of water, 1 teaspoonful of salt and ¼ of a teaspoonful of pepper or 1½ of a green pepper chopped, and draw aside where it will cook slowly for one hour. Toast a number of slices of stale bread, lay them in the bottom of a vegetable dish and pour the gumbo over them. Serve plain boiled rice which has been cooked separately.
A thrifty stovetop gumbo that renders its own cooking fat from the beef trimmings, thickened only by okra and a sliced potato. Nothing here is difficult; the whole result depends on slow, patient heat.
- Render, don't fry"Tried out" means rendered: the chopped beef fat is melted gently over low heat until the solid bits (the "scraps") turn crisp and are lifted out. Rush it and the fat scorches and turns bitter, which will carry through the entire pot. If your beef is too lean to give up much fat, start with 2 tablespoons of a neutral oil or beef tallow.
- The meat is ground, not cubed"Put the meat through the chopper" means a hand-cranked grinder; use 1½ lb of coarse ground beef, or grind chuck yourself for a better texture. The result is a thick meat-and-okra stew rather than a stew of meat in pieces.
- Okra and gumboThere is no filé and no roux here; the okra does all the thickening, releasing its mucilage as it cooks. Use small, tender pods no longer than about 4 inches — large ones are woody and stringy. Frozen sliced okra works and needs no thawing.
- Quantities in pintsA pint is 2 cups. That means roughly 1 lb of fresh tomatoes after peeling and chopping, and about 7-8 oz of sliced okra. To skin fresh tomatoes, score and drop them in boiling water for 30 seconds.
- Pepper measureThe figures are garbled as printed; they read most plausibly as about ¼ teaspoon of black pepper, or in place of it half a chopped green pepper. If you use the fresh pepper, add it with the onion rather than at the end so it has time to soften.
- The hour of slow cooking"Draw aside where it will cook slowly" means moving the pot to a cooler part of the range. On a modern burner, the lowest setting with the lid on, at a bare simmer. It should barely move; a hard boil will break the okra down to threads and dry out the ground beef.
- The toast is the pointSlices of stale toast in the bottom of the serving dish soak up the liquid and act as the starch base, with the boiled rice served alongside rather than under. Toast the bread dark enough that it does not dissolve on contact.
- YieldFeeds four generously, five or six with the rice and bread. It reheats well and thickens further overnight; loosen with a little water.
This is gumbo as it travelled north out of Louisiana into general-purpose American cookbooks — okra doing the thickening, no filé, no shellfish, and beef in place of anything expensive. The word itself is generally traced to a West African term for okra (Bantu ki ngombo). The economy of the dish is easy to read: a pound and a half of lean beef, stretched with a potato, a pint of tomatoes, a pint of okra and a pint of water, then set over toast to catch every drop of the liquid. The cooking fat is rendered from the meat's own trimmings.