Gumbo Oysters
Sauté a few dices of salt pork with a tablespoon of minced onion until nicely browned; add a tablespoon of flour, and when it is well blended, put in a cup of chicken broth, a teaspoon of minced green peppers and a cup each of cooked okra and tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper and strain in the liquor from a pint of fresh oysters. Lastly put in the oysters, and as soon as they are plump, pour over hot Boston crackers, split and buttered.
A quick oyster stew dressed in gumbo clothing: okra, tomato and pepper on a small pork roux, served over crackers rather than rice. It comes together in about twenty minutes, and almost all of the risk is in the last one.
- The oysters go in last, briefly"As soon as they are plump" means roughly one to two minutes in barely simmering liquid, until the edges ruffle. Anything past that and they tighten into rubber and weep their liquid back into the pan. Pull the pot off the heat while they still look slightly underdone.
- Oyster liquor, strainedThe "liquor" is the natural brine in the container of shucked oysters, not a spirit. Strain it through a fine sieve or a coffee filter to catch shell fragments and grit, which are the usual reason a dish like this feels sandy.
- A pint of oystersA standard pint of shucked oysters is 16 fl oz; the count varies by grade, but roughly a dozen large or up to two dozen small. With the crackers this serves three, or four as a first course.
- Salt porkSold as a slab of cured, unsmoked belly or fatback. Blanching it for two minutes before dicing takes the edge off the salt. Thick-cut bacon is the nearest substitute, though it will be leaner and faintly smoky.
- Season at the very endSalt pork, chicken broth and oyster liquor are each salty on their own. Wait until the oysters are in before deciding whether it needs anything beyond pepper.
- Boston crackersA large, thick, plain cracker of the period, bigger and thicker than the common cracker, split horizontally like a biscuit and buttered. Common crackers, split water biscuits or a pile of saltines all work; toast them lightly so they hold up under the broth for a minute before softening.
- Okra and tomatoesBoth are called for already cooked, which suggests leftovers. A cup of frozen sliced okra sautéed until the ropiness cooks off, and a cup of drained canned tomatoes, will do; raw okra dropped straight in will make the broth slippery.
- No filé, despite the nameThere is no filé powder or dark roux here, so the usual gumbo warnings do not apply. The tablespoon of flour is only meant to lightly bind a cup of broth — cook it in the pork fat a minute before adding liquid so it does not taste raw.
The word gumbo is generally traced to a West African term for okra — ki ngombo in Bantu languages — and by the nineteenth century it named both the pod and the Louisiana soups thickened with it. What appears here is the dish as it travelled north: a use of "gumbo" — at least in this recipe — for okra and tomatoes together, applied to an oyster stew of the kind eaten by the barrel in Eastern cities. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued its cook book for a national audience of middle-class housekeepers, and this recipe shows the compromises that involved: canned or leftover vegetables, a cup of broth rather than a stockpot, and Boston crackers standing in for rice. Oysters were still cheap and plentiful enough in the period that a pint of them counted as an economical supper rather than a luxury.