Home › Vegetables › Okra
Okra
Wash, cut off ends of pods, cover with boiling salted water, and cook until tender. Season with butter, salt and pepper. Okra is more often stewed or scalloped with tomato than served plain.
A bare-bones treatment that assumes the cook already knows what tender okra looks like. The two things worth knowing are how to keep the pods from turning slimy and how long "until tender" actually means.
- Keep the pods wholeKeep the cuts minimal -- The recipe says to cut off the ends of the pods, not to slice them lengthwise. Okra's mucilage escapes wherever the flesh is cut, so keeping the trim to the very ends and leaving the seed cavity as intact as possible helps keep boiled okra from going ropy.
- TimingSmall young pods are tender in 5 to 8 minutes of boiling; larger ones take 10 to 12. Longer than that and they collapse and go stringy. Test with a fork tip at the thickest point.
- Choosing podsUse pods no more than about 3 to 4 inches long. Anything larger tends to have developed woody fibre in the ridges that boiling will not soften.
- Salted waterThe recipe specifies only "salted water"; roughly 1 tablespoon of salt per 4 quarts is a reasonable modern reading. A generous volume of water returns to the boil quickly.
- "Scalloped with tomato"In this period a scallop meant a buttered-crumb gratin: sliced cooked okra and tomato layered in a dish, topped with buttered breadcrumbs, and baked until the crumbs brown. The book gives no temperature or time here. The tomato's acid also helps cut the mucilage.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Figure about 1 pound of pods for four as a side dish, with 2 tablespoons of butter.
Okra came to the American South through the transatlantic slave trade from West Africa, where the plant and several of its names originate — "okra" is generally traced to Igbo ọ́kụ̀rụ̀, while "gumbo" comes from Bantu words for the same pod. It stayed a regional vegetable for a long time, which is why a Boston-published book like this one gives it three sentences and immediately points the reader toward the stewed-with-tomato version. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its candy and dessert chapters it carries a serviceable general household section — competent and brief.