Cut the ends and stalks from some tender, stringless okras; cook them in salted water, refresh and drain, then lay them in a salad-bowl. Throw some sweet peppers into hot fat, peel off the skins and cut them in Julienne, add them to the okras, and season with a fine herb mayonnaise (No. 612).
A two-vegetable salad from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen, built on cross-references that a modern reader has to fill in. The hinge is the okra: it must be small, cooked briefly, and cooled fast, or the pods slump and the salad turns slippery.
The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its 3,000-plus numbered entries are cross-referenced like a technical manual rather than written for a home cook. Okra reached American tables chiefly through the Atlantic slave trade and the Gulf South, where it was the thickener of gumbo; its appearance here, dressed in a French fines herbes mayonnaise and paired with peppers, shows a New York luxury kitchen absorbing a Southern and Caribbean vegetable into the classical repertoire — the same impulse that put terrapin and canvasback duck on Delmonico's menus under French names. The dish also reflects a genuine fashion of the 1880s and 1890s for cooked vegetable salads bound in mayonnaise, of which the Macédoine that precedes it in the book is the type specimen.