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Chicken Gumbo Soup
Fry one chicken; remove the bones; quarts of boiling water, three ears of chop fine; place in kettle, with two corn, six tomatoes, sliced fine, twentyfour pods of okra; corn, tomatoes and okra to be fried a light brown in the grease left from frying the chicken; then add to the kettle with water and chicken two tablespoonfuls of rice, pepper and salt; boil slowly one hour.
The original text has been scrambled by a printer's column break — read it as "two quarts of boiling water, three ears of corn, six tomatoes sliced fine, twenty-four pods of okra." Once untangled it is a straightforward one-pot soup.
- The hinge: brown the vegetablesFrying the corn, tomatoes and okra in the chicken fat until light brown is what gives this soup its flavor and cuts okra's slipperiness. Do it in batches in a wide pan over medium-high heat; crowding them steams instead of browning.
- Quantities, decodedOne frying chicken (3-4 lb), 2 quarts boiling water, kernels cut from 3 ears of corn, 6 tomatoes sliced fine, 24 okra pods, 2 tablespoons rice, salt and pepper. It makes about 3 quarts, serving six to eight.
- Fry one chickenThis means cut up and pan-fried in fat, not deep-fried in batter. Brown the pieces well, then pull the meat from the bones and chop it; the bones and skin can go into the pot with the water and be fished out before serving for a better broth.
- OkraTwenty-four small summer pods is roughly 3/4 lb. Trim the caps but do not slice into the seed cavity more than necessary, and use frozen whole pods rather than sliced if fresh are out of season.
- Corn and tomatoesCut the kernels from the cob and scrape the milk in with them. Six field tomatoes is about 2 lb; peel them if you object to the skins, since an hour of slow simmering will not dissolve them.
- RiceTwo tablespoons is a token amount, not a starch course. Long-grain white added at the start will be quite soft after an hour.
- TimingAn hour at a bare simmer is right for the vegetables. The original has the chopped chicken in the kettle for the whole hour; if you prefer, add it in the last 15 minutes so the already-cooked meat does not turn to threads.
- No filéDespite the name, this version is thickened by okra alone. If you add filé powder in the New Orleans manner, stir it in off the heat — boiled filé turns the soup ropy.
"Gumbo" comes from a West African word for okra — ki ngombo in Kikongo and related Bantu forms — and the okra plant itself traveled to the Americas with the transatlantic slave trade. Gumbo had spread well beyond Louisiana into general American cookery, and the simplified okra-corn-tomato "gumbo soup" of the sort given here appears in community and bridal cookbooks, usually with no roux, no shellfish and no filé. Its presence here says something about what such books were for: a chicken already fried for one meal yields a second meal from the bones, the fat and whatever the garden gave up that week.