Chicken Gumbo
1 chicken. 1 doz. pods okra. 3 ears corn. 1 onion. 3 qts. water. 6 large tomatoes. 2 Irish potatoes.
Cut chicken ready to fry. Put four slices of bacon in spider and fry out the grease. Lift out bacon, dredge chicken with flour and saute in bacon grease. Pour over chicken one quart of boiling water and cook until it falls from bone. While chicken is cooking put on vegetables with two quarts of water and cook until done. When chicken is ready, cut fine and add with liquor to the vegetables. Thicken, season and serve.
A plain country gumbo rather than a Creole one: no roux, no filé, and the okra does all the thickening. The instructions are compressed to the point of shorthand, so a few things need filling in.
- SpiderAn old name for a cast-iron frying pan, originally one with legs for standing over coals. Any heavy skillet works.
- The chicken"Cut ready to fry" means jointed into eight or ten pieces, bone in. A 3 1/2 to 4 lb bird is right. The recipe simply says to cook until it falls from the bone; with supermarket chicken figure 45 minutes to an hour.
- Irish potatoesOrdinary white potatoes, distinguished in period American books from sweet potatoes. Two medium ones, peeled and diced.
- Okra is the thickenerThe dozen pods should be sliced into thin rounds so the mucilage releases into the broth. Cook them in the vegetable pot the full time rather than adding them late, which is the opposite of what you would do if you wanted them firm.
- CornCut the kernels from the three ears and then scrape the cobs with the back of the knife to get the milk, which adds body. Frozen corn substitutes at about 2 cups but gives you none of that starch.
- TomatoesSix large tomatoes, peeled; a 28 oz can with its juice is a rough stand-in. Add them with the other vegetables so they have time to break down.
- "Thicken, season"A tablespoon or two of flour worked smooth into a little cold water, stirred in and simmered a few minutes. Season generously with salt and black pepper at the end. The recipe lifts the bacon out and never says what becomes of it; crumbling it back in is a modern choice, not the book's.
- YieldThree quarts of water plus a whole chicken makes 8 to 10 servings as a first course, six as a main dish with bread.
Mrs. Wilson's book is said to have come out of her work as a newspaper and government food writer, and this gumbo shows what the dish looked like once it had travelled out of Louisiana into general American cookbooks: the okra survives, the roux and the filé do not, and the seasoning is left entirely to the cook. The name is generally traced to a West African word for okra, and it is sometimes argued, though the point is contested, that okra's thickening property is what defines a gumbo in the oldest usage, so this version may be closer to the root of the word than to the dark Creole gumbos of New Orleans restaurants. The corn and potatoes mark it as a Southern farmhouse soup, made from what was ripe at the same time as the okra and tomatoes, and the specification "Irish potatoes" is a reminder that in much of the South the unmodified word potato meant the sweet kind.