Okra Soup
One quart of okra; one fowl; one-fourth pound of salt pork; one-half can of tomatoes; one onion; two quarts (full) of boiling water; four tablespoons of flour; two tablespoons (heaping) of butter; three teaspoons of salt; one-half teaspoon.
The Butterick text gives quantities only, and the final line is cut off mid-measurement, so the method has to be reconstructed from period practice. What follows fills in the gaps rather than rewriting the dish.
- The truncated line"One-half teaspoon" ends the entry with no ingredient named. In soups of this type it is almost always pepper; a half teaspoon of black or cayenne pepper is a reasonable reading, but the original does not say so.
- No method givenThe intended procedure is the standard one: simmer the fowl and diced salt pork in the two quarts of boiling water until the meat is tender, add sliced okra, chopped onion and tomatoes, and thicken at the end with the butter and flour worked together. Count on two to three hours for an old bird.
- "One fowl"A fowl in 1900 meant a mature laying hen, tough and full of flavour, cooked long. Supermarket birds are young; a 4-5 lb roasting chicken will do, but it needs far less simmering and gives a thinner stock. A stewing hen from a butcher is closer to the original.
- Half a can of tomatoesPeriod can sizes varied, commonly running from something over a pint up to a quart, so half a can might be anywhere from about a cup to two. A modern 14 oz can sits at the small end of that range; half to a whole one is a defensible reading.
- A quart of okraMeasured whole in the pod, this is about a pound. Sliced crosswise into rounds it will thicken the soup; left in short whole pods it thickens far less. Either is period-correct, so choose according to how thick you want the result.
- The hinge: okra and ironOkra is traditionally said to darken in cast iron, blackening both pot and soup; enamelled or stainless avoids the question. Long, slow cooking is generally held to give body rather than strings, so this is one vegetable that does not suffer from time in the pot.
- The thickeningFour tablespoons of flour to two heaping tablespoons of butter is a flour-heavy roux by modern proportions, though the 'heaping' narrows the gap. Cook it a few minutes before letting down with hot broth, or the soup will taste of raw flour.
- YieldTwo quarts of water plus a whole fowl and a quart of okra gives six to eight generous servings as a first course, or four as a meal.
Okra came to North America from West Africa with the slave trade, and its names travelled with it: the Igbo okuru behind "okra", and the Bantu ki ngombo generally traced as the root of "gumbo". By the late nineteenth century okra soup was thoroughly established in Lowcountry and Gulf Coast kitchens, where it was often built on tomatoes, salt pork and a fowl, though by no means always. Its appearance in a national book like Butterick's, issued in New York in 1911 for a readership of home sewers and housekeepers across the country, shows how far a regional Southern dish had spread by then, though the compilers stripped it to a bare list of quantities and left the method to be assumed. The reliance on canned tomatoes is the period's own signature: by 1900 commercially canned tomatoes were cheap and reliable enough that even a soup built around a fresh summer vegetable took them for granted.