No. 314

Gumbo or Okra with Soft Shell Crabs

Gombo aux Crabes Moux

Set into a saucepan four ounces of butter to heat, add to it two ounces of shallots, four ounces of lean raw ham, and fry without letting attain a color; pour in four quarts of thickened fish stock, a quarter of a pound of finely cut up green peppers and let the whole simmer for twenty minutes, then add sixteen soft shell crabs cut in two or four, according to their size, and well cleansed; boil again for fifteen minutes and drain off the crabs; pare them nicely and return them to the saucepan with the liquid, and thicken this with eight spoonfuls of ground gumbo or okra, and some good butter. Prepare a separate garnishing of rice cooked with twice its quantity of water, salt and lard, boiling all together for ten minutes; fill a buttered one quart charlotte mold with this, and set it in a slack oven for fifteen minutes; unmold, and serve the same time as the soup.

← No. 313 Gumbo or Okra with Hard Crabs, Creole Style Soups & Broths No. 315 Hunters' Style Soup →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer is writing for a brigade with a stockpot always going, and the quantities here are restaurant-scale. A few of his steps also run counter to how anyone would treat soft shell crabs now.

The hinge: the gumbo powder"Ground gumbo or okra" most likely means dried, powdered okra — "gumbo" was itself a name for the pod — though in some kitchens the powder was filé, dried and powdered sassafras leaf. If you use filé, stir it in off the heat at the very end; boiled filé turns the soup stringy and ropy.
Fifteen minutes of crabSoft shells are done in two or three minutes in simmering liquid. A quarter of an hour reduces them to shreds and leaves the shell fragments loose in the broth. Ranhofer partly concedes this by pulling them out to "pare" them, but the modern approach is to clean the crabs first and add them at the finish.
"Pare them nicely"Cleaning a soft shell means cutting away the face behind the eyes, lifting the top shell to pull out the feathery gills on each side, and removing the apron underneath. Do this raw, before the crabs go anywhere near the pot.
Thickened fish stockAlmost certainly fish stock bound with a blond roux rather than plain fumet. Four quarts is a great deal — a quarter of the recipe, with four crabs, is a sensible domestic batch.
SpoonfulsRanhofer does not define the spoon here, and eight of them against four quarts is genuinely ambiguous. Add the powder a teaspoon at a time off the heat, tasting, until the body is where you want it.
Lean raw hamHe means an uncooked cured ham in the prosciutto or country-ham family, cut small and sweated for its salt and savor. A piece of prosciutto end or a slab of unsmoked bacon does the same work.
A slack ovenAround 275-300F. The mold sets the shape, and the oven time also finishes cooking rice that ten minutes' boiling will have left underdone.
The rice moldTwo parts water to one of rice, with salt and lard, boiled ten minutes. A one-quart charlotte mold turns out a cylinder, unmolded and sent out alongside the soup.
YieldAs written, twelve to sixteen bowls as a first course.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole of that kitchen's repertoire — which by the 1890s included a short run of Creole gumbos sitting among the French consommés and purées. Gumbo reached fashionable Northern menus from New Orleans, where the dish drew on West African okra cookery (the word itself is generally traced to a Bantu term for okra), French roux and stock technique, and the Choctaw use of powdered sassafras leaf as a thickener. Ranhofer's phrase "ground gumbo or okra" preserves an older ambiguity: to many nineteenth-century writers gumbo named the thickening powder as much as the soup. Soft shell crabs — blue crabs taken in the days just after molting — were a genuine luxury of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, shipped live on ice to city restaurants, and their appearance here marks this as a dish for the season rather than the standing menu.