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Okra and Tomatoes
1 quart okra 6 large tomatoes or 1 pint can tomatoes 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 small onion Water Wash and remove the stem ends of the okra pods, cut into thin slices. Peel the tomatoes, and press out the seeds. Cut into small pieces, add sliced onion, salt, and sufficient water to almost cover. Cook thirty minutes. Add the butter.
A plain stewed vegetable dish that needs only a few translations for a modern stove.
- A quart of okraMeasured by volume in the pod, this is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of fresh okra, or about 4 cups sliced. Frozen cut okra works and needs no thawing.
- A pint can of tomatoesA 15-16 oz can, drained of most of its liquid, stands in for the six peeled fresh tomatoes. The instruction to press out the seeds is optional by modern taste and costs you juice.
- Water, sparingly"Sufficient water to almost cover" will give you a soupy result if you take it literally with canned tomatoes, which already carry liquid. Start with half a cup and add only if the pan threatens to scorch.
- The thirty minutesLong cooking suits okra: given time the mucilage disperses and thickens the tomato into a sauce, whereas briefly cooked sliced okra tends to stay slippery.
- OnionHalf a small onion is about a quarter cup chopped. Sliced thin, as directed, it will soften into the stew over half an hour.
- Butter lastThe tablespoon of butter goes in after the cooking is done, as directed, which is what gives the finished dish its gloss and body.
- YieldServes four as a side dish, two as a main course over rice or with cornbread. Salt again at the table; one teaspoon for a full quart of vegetables is modest.
Okra stewed with tomatoes is a long-established pairing in Southern American cooking, joining an African vegetable with a New World fruit, and it appears in printed American cookbooks through the nineteenth century as a summer standby. Okra's mucilage thickens the dish as it cooks, the same property that makes it a thickener in gumbo.