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Okra and Sweet Pepper Salad
Okras, sweet peppers, rule for mayonnaise dressing.
Cut the ends and stalks from some tender, stringless okras; cook them in boiling salted water, drain and lay them in a salad bowl. Throw some sweet peppers into hot fat, peel off the skins and cut them in Julienne. Add them to the okras, and cover with a mayonnaise dressing.
A two-ingredient salad that depends entirely on how the okra is handled. The original assumes you know that okra turns to mucilage the moment it is cut open and overcooked.
- Keep the pods wholeTrim only the stem cap and the very tip, without cutting into the seed cavity. Once the pod wall is breached the mucilage leaches into the water and the salad goes slick.
- Cooking timeNo time is given. Small tender pods need 4 to 6 minutes in well-salted boiling water, until a knife tip meets slight resistance. Drain at once and spread them out to cool rather than piling them in a bowl to steam.
- "Stringless" okraThis means young pods, roughly 3 inches or under. Larger ones develop fibrous ridges that no amount of cooking softens; supermarket okra sold loose lets you pick by size, and frozen whole pods are a workable substitute.
- Throwing peppers into hot fatThe fat is a skinning method, not a cooking one. A brief plunge into hot oil blisters the skin so it slips off. A broiler, a gas burner, or a 450F oven until the skins blacken and blister does the same thing with less risk and less mess.
- JulienneMatchsticks about 2 inches long and an eighth of an inch wide. Peel and seed the peppers after blistering, then cut with a knife rather than tearing, so the strips read as deliberate against the whole pods.
- Sweet peppers of the period"Sweet peppers" -- In American cookbooks of this period this usually means a thick-walled green or red bell pepper, not a chile. Red peppers are sweeter and give better colour against the green okra.
- The mayonnaiseThe book expects a hand-made mayonnaise from its own general rule, which will be thicker than jarred. Thin whatever you use with a little lemon juice so it coats rather than clumps, and dress only when both vegetables are fully cold.
- YieldFigure a generous half pound of okra and two peppers for four side salads.
Okra came to the American South through the Atlantic slave trade, and the plant's English name is generally traced to a West African word, most often to Igbo okuru; the alternative name gumbo comes from a Bantu term for the same pod. By the time compilations like this one appeared, okra was turning up in national cookbooks as well as Southern ones, usually stewed with tomatoes or thickening a soup, and rather less often served cold under mayonnaise. The pairing with fire-blistered sweet peppers, and the French cut and dressing, suggest a Southern vegetable given a continental finish for the salad course.