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Beef Soup with Okra
Fry one pound "round" steak cut in bits, two table-spoons butter, and one sliced onion, till very brown; add to three or four quarts cold water in soup-kettle, and boil slowly one hour; then add pint sliced okra, and simmer three hours or more; season with salt and pepper, strain and serve. - Mrs. T. B. J., Tuscumbia, Ala.
A long-simmered clear beef broth in which the okra is a thickener and flavouring rather than a vegetable to be eaten. The whole thing is strained at the end, so texture in the pot matters less than depth of colour.
- Brown properly, then deglazeMost of the colour of the finished soup comes from the fry-up at the start: the beef, butter and onion should go well past golden to genuinely brown. Pour a little of the cold water into the empty frying pan and scrape it out into the kettle, or you leave much of the flavour behind.
- A pint of okraA dry pint of sliced fresh pods is roughly 7-8 oz, or about fifteen to twenty medium pods. A 10 oz bag of frozen cut okra, thawed, is a close enough substitute; it will break down faster but that is no loss here.
- Cold water, slow heatStarting in cold water and holding at a bare simmer is what keeps the broth clear. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds it, which matters because this soup is strained and served as liquid.
- Four quarts is a lot of waterThree to four quarts reduced over four hours yields perhaps two to two and a half quarts of finished soup. If your pot has a tight lid and loses little, start at the lower end or expect a thin result.
- Okra as the thickeningThe mucilage the pods release is the point. It gives the strained broth a faint body that a plain beef stock does not have. Do not rinse or soak the okra to reduce sliminess, and do not add acid, which cuts it.
- Season at the endSalt after the reduction is finished, as the original instructs. Four hours of simmering concentrates whatever you put in early.
- The strained solidsThis recipe strains and serves the liquid, so the solids are left behind. The beef will be exhausted but the okra and onion can be pressed through the strainer for a slightly thicker, cloudier soup if you prefer.
- YieldAbout six servings as a first course. Better on the second day.
Okra came to the American South with the West African slave trade, and by the 1880s it was so thoroughly naturalised in Southern cooking that a soup like this needed no explanation to the book's readers. It sits at the plain end of a family that runs through okra gumbo: the same thickening pod, the same long slow simmer, but no roux, no filé and no shellfish. The Dixie Cook Book was one of the large compiled household volumes of the period, assembled from contributions signed as this one is, with initials and a town — Mrs. T. B. J. of Tuscumbia, Alabama — which is why the measurements are casual and the instructions assume a cook who already knows what a soup-kettle should look like after an hour. The phrase "three hours or more" leaves the timing to the cook's judgement rather than the clock.