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Chicken Gumbo
Dress, clean, and cut up a chicken. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and sauté in pork fat. Fry one-half finely chopped onion in fat remaining in frying-pan. Add four cups sliced okra, sprig of parsley, and one-fourth red pepper finely chopped, and cook slowly fifteen minutes. Add to chicken, with one and one-half cups tomato, three cups boiling water, and one and one-half teaspoons salt. Cook slowly until chicken is tender, then add one cup boiled rice.
A plain 1896 gumbo: no roux, no filé, strictly speaking, just chicken browned in pork fat and stewed with okra and tomato. A few of Farmer's instructions assume a kitchen where the bird arrived with its feathers on.
- "Dress, clean, and cut up"Buy a 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken already cut into eight or ten pieces. Pat it thoroughly dry before flouring or it will steam rather than brown.
- Pork fatRendered fat from salt pork or bacon drippings, about 3 to 4 tablespoons. If you render your own from diced salt pork, keep the crisp bits and add them back at the end.
- Okra quantityFour cups sliced is roughly 1 lb of fresh pods, trimmed and cut into 1/2-inch rounds. Frozen cut okra works and needs no thawing, though it will release more liquid.
- The fifteen minutes of okra mattersCooking the sliced okra slowly in fat, uncovered, drives off much of the mucilage and helps keep the finished gumbo from turning ropy. Follow the recipe's order and cook the okra before the tomato goes in.
- "One-fourth red pepper"Genuinely ambiguous. In this book it most likely means a quarter of a small fresh hot red pepper, which is a modest amount of heat; some readers take it as sweet red pepper. Start with a pinch of cayenne or a quarter of a red chile and adjust.
- TomatoThe recipe does not say whether fresh or canned. One and a half cups is roughly one 14.5-oz can including its juice, or fresh peeled and chopped tomatoes in season.
- "Cook slowly until chicken is tender"Forty-five minutes to an hour at a bare simmer, covered, until the thigh meat pulls from the bone. Dark meat wants 175–180F rather than the 165F you would aim for in a roast breast.
- The riceStirred in at the end rather than served under the gumbo. It will drink up broth as it stands, so add it just before serving or keep the rice separate and spoon the gumbo over.
- YieldFour to six servings as a main course.
Fannie Merritt Farmer printed this in a Boston book, and it shows: the gumbo has traveled north and lost its roux and its filé powder on the way, leaving okra as the only thickener and the only real link to Louisiana. The word gumbo is generally traced to a West African word for okra — ki ngombo or similar in Bantu languages — and okra itself came to the Gulf South with enslaved Africans, which is why the vegetable and the dish share a name. By the 1890s gumbo was well enough known nationally, through Creole cookbooks and exposure such as the 1884 New Orleans exposition, that a Yankee cooking school could offer a version without explaining what it was. What Farmer's recipe tells you about her book is how it standardized: level measurements, a fixed number of cups of okra, a stated quantity of salt, in place of the improvisation a New Orleans cook would have taken for granted.