Okra Soup
Take a nice joint of beef filled with marrow, one gallon water, one onion cut fine, two sprigs parsley, half a peck of okra, one quart tomatoes; boil the meat six hours, add vegetables and boil two hours more. - Mrs. E. L. F.
A Lowcountry okra soup of the plainest kind: long-boiled marrow bone, okra and tomatoes, with no thickener and no seasoning listed beyond onion and parsley. The quantities are generous even by nineteenth-century standards.
- Half a peck of okraA peck is 8 dry quarts, so this calls for roughly 4 quarts of pods, about 3 to 3 1/2 lb. That is right for a gallon of stock, but it is a large soup; expect 10 to 12 servings.
- The marrow bone"A nice joint of beef filled with marrow" probably means a cut shank or marrow bone with meat attached; the recipe gives no weight. Ask a butcher for beef shank cut crosswise; the marrow and connective tissue help give the soup body.
- Eight hours is two hours too manySix hours at a bare simmer will render the shank and marrow completely. The second two hours after the vegetables go in will reduce the okra to threads. Modern practice: simmer the bone 3 to 4 hours, then add okra and tomatoes for 45 minutes to an hour.
- Okra and the ropy questionCut okra releases mucilage, which is the point here — it is the soup's only thickening. Long cooking and the acid from the tomatoes both temper the texture, so slice the pods rather than leaving them whole.
- One quart tomatoesThis may well be home-canned tomatoes, skins and juice, though fresh would have been in season alongside the okra. A quart is about 32 oz, so one 28-oz can of whole peeled tomatoes, crushed by hand, is close to the equivalent. Fresh tomatoes work if you peel them.
- Water levelA gallon of water simmered uncovered for six hours will lose a great deal. Keep the lid ajar and top up to hold roughly a gallon, or you will be left with too little liquid for the vegetables.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified, which is common in period recipes that leave it to the cook's judgment. Salt after the meat has given up its flavor, and finish with black pepper; bay leaf and a little cayenne are often added to soups of this kind.
- ServingPull the meat from the bone, shred it, and return it to the pot. Serve over rice in the Carolina and Georgia manner, or plain with cornbread.
Okra soup is one of the clearest lines running from West Africa into Southern cooking. The plant itself came to the Americas through the slave trade, and the word is generally traced to Igbo ọkụrọ; gumbo, the name of the related thickened Gulf dish, is usually linked to Bantu terms for the pod. By the time The Dixie Cook Book was compiled in the 1880s, okra soup thickened with nothing but the pods themselves was common summer fare from the Carolina Lowcountry through Georgia and into the Gulf states, made when okra and tomatoes came in together and a marrow bone could be had cheaply from the butcher. The recipe's brevity and the initials at the end are characteristic of the book's method: contributions gathered from correspondents and printed largely as received, often credited only by initials.