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Bread-crumbs
Bits of butter Salt and paprika Mix chicken, rice, gravy, seasoning, and yolk of egg. Make white sauce; while hot add chicken mixture. Cool slightly, fold in white of egg, put into buttered baking-dish, cover with breadcrumbs and bits of butter. Bake half an hour. Chicken Gumbo Soup (West Indian) Chicken stock, sea- 3 tomatoes soned 6 or 8 okras sliced thin 1/4 onion cut in pieces 2 teaspoonfuls butter I carrot 2 ears of corn Pieces of cooked chicken Cook carrot sliced in straws in small amount of water, letting the water boil down. Simmer together (covered) okras, onion, and butter for fifteen minutes. Add tomatoes cut in pieces, and cook until soft, then add the cooked carrot and carrot liquid. Put these vegetables into the stock (of which there should be about one and a half quarts), and cook together until all are tender. Fifteen minutes before serving put in corn, which has been scored and scraped from cob. Finally add chicken.
Heat almost to boiling, and serve.
Two separate dishes run together here: the closing directions for a baked chicken-and-rice mixture, and a complete chicken gumbo soup. The soup is the part that can be cooked start to finish as printed.
- Oven for the baked dishThe recipe gives no oven heat at all, only "Bake half an hour." A moderate oven (around 350F) is a reasonable modern reading. The mixture is already cooked through, so the half hour is for setting the egg and browning the crumb top.
- Crumbs and butterScatter the crumbs evenly and dot with small pieces of butter so they brown rather than dry out. The recipe specifies neither the type of crumb nor the quantity, nor the size of the baking-dish.
- Okra is the thickenerThis is a gumbo in the older, literal sense: gumbo is generally traced to a West African word for okra. There is no roux and no file powder. The 15-minute covered simmer of okra, onion and butter at the start is what breaks the pods down and gives the soup body, so do not shorten it.
- Onion quantityThe amount of onion is illegible in the ingredient list as printed. One medium onion, cut in rough pieces, suits a soup of this size.
- Stock volumeA quart and a half of seasoned chicken stock is the base. Homemade stock is worth it here; commercial broth is saltier, so season at the end rather than the start.
- Scored and scraped cornRun a knife tip down each row of kernels to split them, then scrape the cob with the back of the blade. This releases the milky pulp and leaves the tough hulls behind. Two ears give roughly a cup.
- Do not boil at the finishThe chicken is already cooked. Heating "almost to boiling" is the instruction that matters: a hard boil shreds the meat and toughens it, and the corn turns starchy.
- YieldThe soup serves four to six as a first course, or four as a main with bread.
Gumbo built on okra alone, without a browned flour roux, is often said to be the older form of the dish and the one closest to its West African root: the word is generally traced to the Bantu term for okra, ki ngombo. Naming it "West Indian" places it in the Caribbean line of the dish rather than the Louisiana one, and the vegetable-forward treatment here, with carrot, tomato and fresh corn scraped from the cob, reads more like a garden soup than a Creole gumbo. Its presence in a book of left-overs is the point: the vegetables carry the flavour, and the cooked poultry is added last, in whatever quantity remained.