Pineapple Soup
of pepper. The tomatoes are not absolutely necessary. Wash the fowl, and cut it into joints and other pieces convenient to handle. Slice the pork, and fry it brown; then remove it from the pan, put the chicken into the fat, fry it until brown, and then place it in the soup-kettle. Wash the okra carefully and cut it into slices. Cut the onion fine, and cook in the frying-pan for two minutes; then put in the okra, and after the mixture has cooked for ten minutes, transfer it to the soup-kettle. Put the butter and flour in the frying-pan, and stir them until brown. Pour two quarts of boiling water into the kettle, stir in the browned flour, add the tomatoes and seasoning, cover the soup and let it simmer for two and one-half hours. At the end of that time remove the bones of the fowl, and serve the soup without straining.
The heading on this page does not match the text: what follows is a chicken and okra gumbo, and the opening line ("of pepper") shows the ingredient list has been cut off by a page break. Work from the method, and supply the quantities yourself.
- What the missing list heldThe method calls for a fowl, pork (the type is not named, though salt pork is the usual choice in such gumbos), okra, one onion, butter and flour, optional tomatoes, seasoning including pepper, and two quarts of boiling water. A workable set: one 4 lb chicken, 3 oz salt pork, 1 lb okra, 1 large onion, 2 tbsp each butter and flour, 1 cup canned tomatoes.
- Fowl means an old birdA "fowl" was a spent laying hen, tough and full of collagen, which is why it takes two and a half hours. A supermarket chicken will be falling apart in 60 to 90 minutes; simmer until the meat leaves the bone and no longer.
- Soup-kettleSimply a large lidded stockpot, 6 to 8 quarts here. Nothing about the original vessel matters to the result.
- The browned flour is the pointButter and flour stirred in the pan until brown is a roux, and its colour carries most of the flavour. Take it to the shade of peanut butter over medium-low heat, stirring constantly; if it scorches or speckles black, start again, as burnt roux turns the whole pot bitter.
- Okra and ropinessTen minutes in the pan with the onion probably serves to cook down the mucilage before the okra meets liquid. It is worth doing in full, or the soup may be slippery rather than thickened.
- Salt porkRinse it if heavily cured, and hold back on salt until the end. The recipe fries the pork only to render fat for browning the chicken, and does not say to return the slices to the pot.
- BoningLift the pieces out onto a plate, pull the meat off while it is still hot, and return it in bite-sized pieces. The instruction to serve unstrained means the okra, onion and tomato stay in as body.
- YieldTwo quarts of water plus the chicken gives about two and a half quarts of soup, or six to eight modest bowls. Gumbo of this kind was often served over a spoonful of plain rice, though this recipe does not say so.
The dish under this misplaced heading is a chicken gumbo, the okra-thickened soup of Louisiana whose name is generally traced to a West African word for okra (nkombo or kingombo in Bantu languages), carried into the Gulf South by enslaved cooks. Butterick's cookbook, published in New York around the turn of the twentieth century by the pattern company, drew regional American dishes into a national household manual, and gumbo appears here in the soups chapter. Two details mark it as an honest version: the browned flour roux and the insistence on cooking the okra down in the pan first. The garbled heading is an artefact of where the page begins, which separates the method from the ingredient list it belongs to.