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Okra Soup
Cut in slices a quarter of a pound of pork, put it in a fryingpan, fry gently for a few minutes and add a sliced onion and one quart of green okra pods cut into small pieces. Put the lid on and fry the okras for thirty minutes. In the meantime cut the meat from a cold roast fowl, place the bones in a saucepan with a quart of water and boil. Squeeze out all the pork fat from the okras and onions and place these in the saucepan with the bones. Put three tablespoonfuls of flour in the pan with the pork fat, and when it is a rich brown add it to the bones in the saucepan; cover over the pot and simmer gently for three hours. Strain through a fine sieve into another saucepan, pour in two quarts of stock and add the fowl meat cut in pieces and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer gently for twenty minutes, turn the whole into a tureen and serve very hot.
A leftovers soup built the long way: okra and pork are cooked down to nothing, strained out, and their flavour carried by a brown roux and the carcass stock. Nothing of the okra survives to the tureen except body and taste.
- The pork"A quarter of a pound of pork" is most likely salt pork or fat belly rather than lean loin — its job is to render fat for the roux. Unsmoked salt pork or fatty pancetta gives a similar result; bacon will push the soup toward smoke.
- A quart of okraMeasured as cut pods, a quart is roughly 1 lb fresh okra. Frozen sliced okra works, but thaw and drain it first or the thirty-minute covered fry becomes a steam.
- The thirty-minute fry is the pointCooking okra down in fat until it collapses is generally held to tame its mucilage, turning it from slippery to savoury; cut it short and the soup is likelier to come out ropy than silky.
- Brown the roux slowlyThree tablespoons of flour in the rendered pork fat should go to a rich nut brown over low heat, stirring constantly. Flour scorched even slightly turns the whole pot bitter, and there is no rescuing it later.
- "A cold roast fowl"This assumes yesterday's roast chicken; a bird of 3–4 lb gives both the picked meat and the carcass. A supermarket rotisserie chicken will do, though it comes already seasoned.
- The stockTwo quarts of "stock" is presumably unseasoned chicken or light veal stock rather than water. With what remains of the quart boiled on the bones, the finished pot is a little under three quarts, so a 6-quart pan is ample.
- StrainingEverything solid is discarded at the sieve stage — press hard on the okra and pork to extract the body they have given up. Only the picked fowl meat goes back in.
- Timing and yieldThree hours simmering, twenty minutes more once the meat returns; the meat wants no longer or it shreds to threads. The pot makes something under three quarts, enough for eight or more as a first course.
Okra came to American kitchens by way of West Africa and the Caribbean, and by the nineteenth century okra soup was firmly a Southern dish — the Carolinas and Georgia claimed it as their own, often built on beef shin and tomatoes rather than fowl. This version is telling in what it does with the vegetable: the okra is cooked to pieces and then strained out entirely, leaving only its thickening and its flavour. It is also, quietly, a thrift recipe. The soup begins with a cold roast bird and its bones, and the three-hour simmer is what turns yesterday's carcass into something worth carrying to the table in a tureen."