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Virginia Gumbo
2 CUPS SLICED OKRA 3 TOMATOES, CUT UP SALT PEPPER 2 TABLESPOONS BUTTER 1/2 CUP RICE Cover okra and tomatoes with 3 cups cold water and cook gently until done. Press all through a sieve. Add salt, pepper, butter and rice. Heat to near boiling point and serve.
A thin okra-and-tomato purée thickened with rice, meant to be assembled over a camp fire with one pot and a sieve. It works, but two lines need reading carefully before you start.
- The rice must already be cookedHalf a cup of raw rice will not soften in liquid brought only to "near boiling point" and served. Use about 1/2 cup cooked long-grain rice, or cook the rice separately and spoon it into the bowls.
- Sieving is the pointThis is a smooth soup, not a stew. Push the cooked okra and tomato through a medium sieve with the back of a ladle, pressing hard and scraping the underside; discard the seeds and fibre left behind. A food mill does the same work; a stick blender will purée but leaves the seeds and fibre in.
- Cook gently means gentlyThe recipe says only "until done"; fifteen to twenty minutes at a bare simmer should be enough for sliced okra and cut tomatoes. There is no call for a hard boil.
- Fresh okra, or frozen slicedTwo cups of sliced okra is roughly 8 oz of pods, trimmed. Frozen cut okra works and needs no thawing; skip canned, which is already soft and tastes of the brine.
- TomatoesThree medium fresh tomatoes, about 1 lb. Out of season, use a 14 oz tin of whole tomatoes with their juice and reduce the added water to about 2 cups.
- Season at the endThe three cups of water reduce very little here, so the soup is naturally mild. Salt after sieving, when you can taste the finished volume, and add the butter off the heat rather than boiling it in.
- YieldMakes about 4 cups, enough for three or four small servings as a first course or two larger bowls.
The word gumbo comes through Louisiana French from a West African name for okra — Bantu ki ngombo is the form usually cited — and in the nineteenth-century American South the name was applied to okra-thickened soups, with or without shellfish, roux or filé. This version is a plain one: okra and tomatoes stewed together, sieved smooth, finished with butter and rice, no meat and no browned flour. Okra and tomatoes come in together in a Southern summer and were often grown side by side, and the combination turns up as a side dish, a soup and a pickle in the same books. The dish needs one pot, keeps no perishable meat, and can be built from whatever the garden or a roadside stand gave up that morning.