Gumbo
Slice a large onion and put it with a slice of bacon or fat ham into a skillet and brown it; skin and cut up two quarts tomatoes, cut thin one quart okra, put all together with a little parsley into a stew-kettle, adding about three quarts water, and cook slowly two or three hours, adding salt and pepper to taste. -Mrs. E. A. W.
A plain okra-and-tomato gumbo with no roux, no seafood and no file: the long, slow simmer is doing all the work. A few notes on quantities and on why the cooking time is as long as it is.
- The hinge: cook the okra down, not brieflyTwo to three hours seems extreme by modern standards, but that is the point. Okra's mucilage thickens the pot only if it is given time to break down and disperse; pulled off at thirty minutes you get slippery strings in thin tomato water.
- Brown the onion properlyWith no flour roux, the only depth in this soup comes from the onion and the pork fat caramelizing in the skillet. Take it to a real brown, then deglaze the skillet with a ladle of the liquid so nothing is left behind.
- Two quarts of tomatoesRoughly 4 lb of fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped; the original does not make clear whether the quart measure was taken before or after cutting. Two 28-oz cans of whole tomatoes, crushed by hand with their juice, is the practical substitute out of season.
- One quart of okraRoughly 1 lb of pods, sliced thin into rounds. Frozen cut okra works and needs no thawing.
- Vessels"Skillet" and "stew-kettle" are two pans in the original. A heavy 6-quart Dutch oven does both jobs; brown in it, then add everything else.
- "A slice of bacon or fat ham"One or two thick rashers, or a 3-4 oz piece of ham hock or salt pork. It is seasoning meat, not a protein component, and it stays in the pot throughout.
- Water and reductionThree quarts of water into a pot already holding two quarts of tomatoes gives a very thin start, and a two- to three-hour simmer will concentrate it considerably. The original specifies neither lid nor timing for the seasoning; leaving the lid ajar and salting once the volume has settled is one way to handle it.
- Yield and servingSeveral quarts finished, enough for eight servings. Serving over hot white rice is common Southern practice for okra gumbos, though the recipe itself offers no direction.
The word gumbo is generally traced to a West African term for okra -- Bantu ki ngombo is the usual citation -- and in nineteenth-century American cookbooks it could mean either a thickened Louisiana stew or, as here, simply a soup built on okra. This version belongs to the second family: no roux, no file, no shellfish, just okra and tomatoes stewed with a little cured pork, which is close to what Charleston and the coastal South called okra soup and what Creole kitchens distinguished as gumbo fevi, the okra-thickened kind. The Dixie Cook Book was a compilation of contributed receipts, and the initials at the end are the whole attribution -- household cooking passed along by a neighbor, with the assumption that anyone reading it already knew how thin to slice okra and how a pot should look after three hours on the back of the stove.