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Pepper (Tablespoon chopped onion Clean)
4 cups Fish Stock. 1 pint oysters. 1/4 cup butter. 1/2 can okra. 1/3 can tomatoes. 1 tablespoon chopped onion Clean, pick over, and parboil oysters; drain, and add oyster liquor to Fish Stock. Cook onion five minutes in one-half the butter; add to stock. Then add okra, tomatoes heated and drained from some of their liquor, oysters, and remaining butter. Season with salt and pepper.
Fish Stock is the liquor obtained by covering the head, tail, skin, bones, and small quantity of flesh adhering to bones of fish, with cold water, bringing slowly to boilingpoint, simmering thirty minutes, and straining.
The page has come down to us with its ingredient list truncated — only the onion survives — so what follows is a method rather than a formula. The proportions below are the ones the surrounding recipes in this section imply.
- The missing ingredient listWorking backward from the method, you need oysters with their liquor, okra, tomatoes, butter, chopped onion, salt and pepper, plus fish stock. A workable set for four is a pint of oysters, 2 cups fish stock, 1 cup sliced okra, 1 cup tomatoes and 2 tablespoons butter. Treat these as reconstruction, not as the book's own figures.
- Parboil means seconds, not minutesParboil here is brief -- The recipe says only 'parboil' and gives no time. In practice oysters need no more than the moment their edges ruffle, well under a minute in their own liquor, before draining; longer and they tighten. They are heated again briefly in the finished soup.
- Fish stockThe frame at the end of the recipe is the whole method: bones, head, tail and skin covered with cold water, brought slowly to a boil, simmered thirty minutes, strained. Thirty minutes is still common practice; long simmering of fish bones is generally said to turn a stock bitter, though the point at which that happens is a matter of kitchen lore rather than a fixed number. Ask a fishmonger for the frame of a lean white fish; salmon and mackerel are too strong here.
- Okra and the ropiness questionSliced okra releases mucilage as it cooks, which is what thickens this soup. If you want less of it, sear the slices dry in a hot pan before they go in. Do not add filé — this is a butter-and-okra soup, not a filé gumbo.
- Tomatoes"Heated and drained from some of their liquor" suggests tomatoes packed in liquid, most likely canned; canned tomatoes were widely available by the 1890s. Draining keeps the soup from turning watery; save the drained juice in case you want to loosen it later.
- The butter in two partsHalf cooks the onion; the remainder goes in unmelted with the okra, tomatoes and oysters. The recipe gives no further instruction, but the late butter is for gloss and flavour, so it is worth swirling it through off a hard boil.
This is an oyster-and-okra soup of a kind long associated with Gulf Coast cookery. Okra, tomato and oyster are a combination often found in Creole gumbo, and the word gumbo is generally traced to a West African name for okra itself, brought to Louisiana with enslaved cooks. What makes this version distinctive is the discipline of the fish stock instruction appended at the end: nothing is wasted, the head, tail, skin and bones all go into cold water, and the timing is specified to the half hour. That is the cooking-school method at work — a Southern dish rewritten as a lesson in stock. Making full use of everything the fishmonger sold you was ordinary thrift, and here it is set down as a rule.