Oyster Gumbo
1 tablespoon chopped red pepper 1 quart okra 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour salt and pepper 1 cup cooked rice Melt butter, add chicken, and sauté. Remove chicken; add onion, okra, pepper. Cook ten minutes. Add to chicken and cover with boiling water. When chicken is tender, add oysters and cook until edges curl. Melt butter, add flour, and thicken soup. Serve garnished with rice.
The printed ingredient list has lost several of its lines — chicken, oysters and onion all appear in the method but never in the list — so this is a recipe to read as a template rather than a set of measurements.
- The missing quantitiesFor the amounts of butter, flour and okra given, a 3 to 4 lb chicken cut up, one large onion chopped, and a pint of shucked oysters with their liquor are proportionate. Nothing in the original confirms these figures; they are inference from the method.
- A quart of okraMeasured as whole trimmed pods, that is roughly 1 lb fresh okra, sliced about half an inch thick. Frozen cut okra works and holds its shape better; it goes in without thawing.
- Red pepperHere "chopped red pepper" and a tablespoon measure point to a fresh pod rather than cayenne powder, though plain "red pepper" in books of this period often does mean the ground spice. A red bell pepper gives sweetness, a fresh red chile heat; the tablespoon measure suggests something mild.
- The oysters are the hinge"Cook until edges curl" is a two-minute instruction at most, and it should be the last thing that happens. Oysters held longer in hot broth turn tough and leach out their liquor, which is where most of their flavour is.
- Two lots of butterThe butter and flour at the end are a separate roux from the fat the chicken was browned in. Cook the flour in the butter until it smells nutty, then whisk in a ladle of hot soup before returning it to the pot, or it will lump.
- Okra does the thickening tooTen minutes' cooking sets the okra's mucilage working; the flour is reinforcement, not the whole structure. If the gumbo is thicker than you want, thin with more boiling water rather than cutting the okra.
- The rice is a garnishIt is cooked separately and spooned into the bowl, in the New Orleans manner — a mound in the centre with the soup ladled around it, not rice simmered in the pot.
- YieldWith the quantities inferred above, this would serve roughly six to eight as a first course or four as a main, but with the chicken and oysters missing from the list the yield cannot be fixed from the original.
Gumbo is the dish where West African, French and Creole cooking meet in one pot, and its name is generally traced to a West African word for okra — ki ngombo in Bantu languages — the vegetable itself having come to the Gulf Coast through the slave trade. Two thickeners define the family: okra, as here, and filé, the powdered sassafras leaf borrowed from the Choctaw; it is often said that okra gumbos were the summer version, when pods were in season, and filé the winter one, though this is more a repeated generalisation than documented practice. That this recipe turns up in Lowney's Cook Book — a general kitchen manual issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — says something about how such books worked. The chocolate firm's own products account for a slice of the volume, and the rest is a broad household repertoire assembled for New England cooks, in which a Louisiana soup arrives as a piece of regional Americana rather than as anything the compiler expected the reader to know already.