Gumbo Soup
1 pound beef 1 quart okras 1 small onion 1 sprig parsley. 1 small carrot 1 large tomato Pinch of cloves Salt and pepper 2 quarts cold water Cut the beef into small pieces; wash the okras and cut them in slices. Slice the onion; chop the parsley; grate the carrot; and cut the tomato into small pieces. Add the water and seasoning and bring all to a boil. Set aside to cool; skim off the hardened fat; return to the fire and let simmer slowly for four hours, closely covered.
The page as printed is a loose-leaf casualty: two ingredient lists have collided, so the okra, butter, celery and bay leaves appear in the text with no quantities attached, and the method never mentions the butter at all. Read it as a beef-shank broth thickened with okra and treat the amounts below as reconstruction.
- The missing okra measureOkra is central to the dish but no quantity survives on the page. Something in the region of a pound of fresh pods, sliced thin, would suit two quarts of water, but the figure is a guess; nothing on the page fixes it.
- Shin of beefThis is the beef shank, sold today as cross-cut shank or osso buco. The marrow and connective tissue are the point of it, so buy it bone-in and cut the meat off in pieces rather than asking for stew meat.
- The butter is for browningFour tablespoons of butter with no instruction attached may well belong at the start: brown the beef and the sliced onions in it before the water goes in. The page gives no instruction either way.
- Cool, skim, then simmerBringing to a boil and setting the pot aside to cool before skimming is a deliberate defatting method, not a curiosity. Shank throws a great deal of fat; chilling it to a solid cap is far cleaner than skimming a hot surface. Refrigerate rather than leaving the pot on the counter, and get it back to a simmer promptly.
- Four hours, closely coveredThat is right for shank and worth keeping. Hold it at a bare tremble around 195F; a rolling boil will shred the meat and cloud the broth. Adding the okra only for the last 30 to 45 minutes keeps it from dissolving into strings, though this is a departure from the page, which has it in from the start.
- Cloves and bayA "pinch of cloves" most likely means ground rather than whole cloves, and a pinch is the whole of it. Two bay leaves in two quarts is generous by modern taste; pull them at the two-hour mark.
- YieldTwo quarts of water plus the meat reduces to roughly six good bowls, or eight as a first course. Salt at the end, after the reduction, not at the start as written.
"Gumbo soup" in a general American cookbook of this era is a northern adaptation rather than a Creole gumbo: there is no roux, no filé, no shellfish and no rice, only okra doing the work of thickening in an otherwise ordinary beef stock. The word itself is generally traced to a West African term for okra, and the vegetable travelled with the transatlantic slave trade into the Gulf South, where the plant's mucilage gave the dish both its texture and its name. By the time the recipe reached books like this one it had been translated into the language of the household soup kettle — shin of beef, a mirepoix, a long covered simmer — which is why it sits in the Soups chapter rather than among the made dishes. The instruction to set the pot aside to cool and lift off the hardened fat belongs to the same practical world.