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Stewed Okra
Wash one pint of okra, cut it into pieces crosswise, place in a granite stewpan, cover with salted boiling water and simmer gently for one-half hour. Add two tomatoes that have been peeled and chopped and stew for ten minutes longer. Add a seasoning of butter, pepper, and salt, if more salt is needed.
A plain okra-and-tomato stew of the sort that appears in nearly every turn-of-the-century American vegetable chapter. Two details need translating: the pan and the cooking time.
- A pint of okraVegetables were measured by volume in this period. A pint of sliced okra is roughly 10-12 oz, or about 20 medium pods.
- Granite stewpan"Granite" or "graniteware" means enamelled steel. A non-reactive pan suits this dish, since the acid of the tomatoes can pick up a dark, metallic taste from bare iron or unlined copper. Any stainless, enamelled or nonstick saucepan does the same job.
- The half hour is the point, not a mistakeThirty minutes of gentle simmering is far longer than modern cooks give okra, and it will be soft and thoroughly slick. That is the intended texture of a stewed okra. If you want the pods to hold their shape and stay firm, 8-10 minutes is enough, but you are then making a different dish.
- If you dislike the mucilageCut the pods no smaller than 1/2 inch, keep the water at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, and add the tomatoes earlier — their acid noticeably slackens the ropiness. Slicing thin and stirring hard does the opposite.
- Cover with boiling waterUse only enough to just cover; the okra releases liquid of its own. Drain off any excess before the butter goes in, or the finished dish will be soup.
- Two tomatoesAround 12 oz of ripe tomatoes. Out of season, a cup of drained canned tomatoes is closer to what the original cook had in her summer garden than a hard supermarket one.
- Salt at the endThe okra is cooked in salted water and reduces, so taste before adding more, as the recipe advises. A tablespoon of butter is about right.
- YieldServes three or four as a side dish. Good with cornbread, rice or ham.
Okra came to the American South with the transatlantic slave trade — the plant is African in origin, and the word itself is generally traced to an Igbo term (ọ́kwụ̀rụ̀), while the alternate name "gumbo" is usually traced to Bantu forms such as ki ngombo. By the time the Butterick Publishing Company issued its cook book in 1911, okra stewed with tomatoes had travelled well out of the Gulf states and into general-purpose Northern household manuals. The specification of a granite stewpan is of a piece with the period: enamelled steel was the affordable, non-reactive, easily scrubbed cookware of the era, marketed to housekeepers who had grown up with cast iron and tinned copper.