Home › Soups › Cream of Okra Soup
Cream of Okra Soup
1 cup canned okra 1/2 cup strained tomato 1 cup water 2/3 cup cream 1 teaspoon brown sugar 1 teaspoon grated onion 3 tablespoons Japanese Soy 1 tablespoon flour Cook together the strained tomato, water and Soy. Add the okra, and heat. Strain through a colander. Add grated onion, brown sugar and the flour moistened with a little cold water. Heat the cream, add to the soup before serving. After the flour is added the soup should be cooked until the raw taste of the starch is gone.
A small, quickly made soup that leans on soy sauce for the savor that meat stock would otherwise supply. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes.
- Add the cream last and off the boilTomato acid plus heat will curdle cream. Warm the cream separately, stir it in at the end, and do not let the finished soup return to a simmer.
- Japanese SoyThis is shoyu, ordinary Japanese-style soy sauce. Three tablespoons in roughly two and a half cups of liquid is assertive by modern standards. Start with two tablespoons and taste before adding more; no additional salt should be needed.
- Strained tomatoTomato pulp pressed free of skin and seed, i.e. passata or a thin tomato purée. Not concentrated tomato paste, which is several times stronger.
- Canned okraCanned okra is soft and already cooked, so it needs only heating. Frozen cut okra works if thawed and simmered a few minutes; a cup of fresh sliced okra will need eight to ten minutes to soften before it can be pushed through a sieve.
- StrainingA colander will not do much here beyond catching whole pods. Use a fine sieve and press the okra through with the back of a ladle so the pulp and its natural mucilage go into the soup, which is where the body comes from; discard the seeds and fibre.
- Cooking out the flourThe instruction to cook until the raw starch taste is gone means three to five minutes of gentle simmering after the slurry goes in, stirring. Do this before the cream is added, not after.
- Grated onionGrated raw onion on a box grater gives juice and a sharp bite. If that reads too raw, soften it in a little butter first.
- YieldAbout two and a half cups, or two generous servings as a first course.
Meatless cookbooks of the early twentieth century faced one recurring problem: how to get depth of flavor into a soup with no meat stock behind it. Soy sauce was one of the answers, and it turns up in vegetarian and wartime-economy cookery of the period, often labelled "Japanese Soy." Okra itself came to American kitchens from West Africa, carried through the Atlantic slave trade and long established in Southern cooking by the time it appeared in cans; the canned form made a summer vegetable available year-round and to Northern cooks who had never seen a fresh pod. The mucilage that makes okra divisive as a vegetable is exactly what recommends it here, thickening the soup with only a tablespoon of flour to help it along.