No. 336

Oyster Soup with Powdered Okra or Gumbo

Soupe aux Huitres au Gombo en poudre

Mince a two ounce onion finely, fry it in two ounces of butter without letting it attain a color, then add sixty medium oysters with their juice, and the same quantity of water, season with salt and red pepper, then place the saucepan on a quick fire and remove at the first boil; skim and thicken with two spoonfuls of powdered gumbo for each quart of soup. Have some rice boiled in salted water; when done, mix in with it a little butter and set it in a buttered mold, place it in a hot oven for ten minutes and serve this separately, but at the same time as the soup, after unmolding it.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A brief Creole-inflected oyster soup from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen, built on two ideas modern cooks tend to get wrong: oysters cook in seconds, and filé must never boil.

The hinge: no boiling after the powderAdd the powdered gumbo off the heat, stirring it in once the pot has stopped bubbling — the recipe itself says to remove at the first boil before thickening. If the powder is sassafras file, boiling it is generally held to make the soup stringy and ropy, so keep it off the fire.
"Powdered gumbo""Powdered gumbo" is ambiguous: it may mean file powder — dried, ground sassafras leaf — but dried powdered okra was also sold under the same loose name, and "gombo en poudre" does not settle it. In Ranhofer a "spoonful" generally means a tablespoon, so two spoonfuls per quart is a substantial quantity; add it gradually to taste, as strengths vary.
Oyster timing"Remove at the first boil" is correct and deliberate. The oysters need only to plump and firm at the edges, about a minute; holding them at a simmer for even five minutes makes them tough and shrunken.
Weights and quantitiesTwo ounces of onion is one small onion, roughly half a cup minced. Two ounces of butter is four tablespoons. Sixty medium oysters is perhaps three pints shucked with their liquor; with the same quantity of water called for, that gives something on the order of three to four quarts of soup.
Oyster liquorStrain the liquor through a fine sieve or cloth before it goes in the pot; shell grit is the usual fault in this kind of soup. Do not substitute water for the liquor — it carries most of the flavour.
Red pepperRed pepper here means cayenne rather than paprika or black pepper. The recipe gives no quantity, so season to taste; note that the seasoning goes in with the oysters and water, not into the butter.
The rice moldBoiled rice pressed into a buttered mold and set in a hot oven for ten minutes to firm and lightly crust the outside; the book gives no temperature. Turn it out onto a warmed dish and send it to the table alongside, so diners spoon rice into the soup rather than the rice sitting in it and going soft.
YieldAbout eight to ten servings as a first course. File-thickened soup is generally said not to reheat well, so it is best to make only what will be eaten.

A Little History

Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's for some three decades, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt at a complete reference — hence a French-titled oyster soup finished with an ingredient from the Louisiana Gulf. File powder is generally traced to the Choctaw, who dried and pounded young sassafras leaves; the word gombo is usually derived from a Bantu/West African term for okra, and nineteenth-century American sources are often unclear about which thickener the name "gumbo" denotes. Oysters were still cheap and plentiful in the 1890s, and the separately molded rice keeps the starch out of the tureen so the broth reaches the table clear.