Okra Soup
2 cups canned okra 2 cups water 2 teaspoons grated onion 4 tablespoons Japanese Soy 1 1/2 cups strained tomatoes Rub the okra through a colander. Heat the okra and other ingredients, and serve.
A five-ingredient wartime soup that leans on soy sauce for the savour a meat stock would normally supply. The whole thing takes about ten minutes; the only real decisions are about salt and texture.
- "Japanese Soy"This means ordinary brewed soy sauce, in the period sold as "soy" or "shoyu" rather than by brand. Four tablespoons in a pot this size is aggressively salty by current palates — start with two and taste.
- Strained tomatoesTomato purée or passata, not paste and not tomato sauce. Canned whole tomatoes pushed through a sieve give the closest match to what the author would have had.
- Rubbing through a colanderPresumably to break the okra down and hold back the coarsest pod fibre. A food mill or a coarse sieve does the job faster; a blender will incorporate the seeds, which is acceptable but changes the texture.
- Canned okraStill sold, though often only in the American South. Two cups drained frozen cut okra, simmered until soft, substitutes directly. Fresh okra needs to be simmered until thoroughly soft before it will pass through a sieve.
- Don't boil hardOkra's mucilage is what thickens this soup, and vigorous boiling with acid tomato will thin it. Bring it just to a bare simmer and serve.
- Grated onionRaw grated onion, added with everything else, keeps a sharp edge. If you want it rounder, soften the onion in a little oil first — the original assumes speed over depth.
- YieldAbout five cups; four modest servings, or two as a main with bread. It thickens on standing and will want thinning with water when reheated.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in the United States around the First World War, when meat conservation was a matter of public campaign as much as of vegetarian principle, and their central technical problem was where to find savour without stock. Soy sauce was one of the standard answers: a bottled shortcut to the dark, salty depth of a beef broth. Okra came to American soups through the Southern kitchen, and its West African origins are generally traced through the plant's names — okra and gumbo both descend from West African words. What is striking here is the reliance on the can: canned okra, canned strained tomatoes and a bottle of soy make a soup with no stock, no fat and no cooking to speak of, which is precisely the sort of pantry arithmetic these books were written to teach.