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Gumbo Soup
Anonymous.
Put on half a peck of tomatoes in a porcelain kettle and let them stew; have half a peck of ochra cut in fine shreds; put them with thyme, parsley and an onion cut fine, into the tomatoes and let them cook until quite tender. Fricassee one chicken in ham gravy; then take the yolk of four eggs, a little vinegar, the juice of one lemon, and season to taste, beating the eggs into the vinegar; pour this over the chicken, and put all then into the tomatoes, letting the kettle be nearly filled with water. Boil all together four or five hours.
A plantation-scale gumbo written for a hearth kettle: as given it fills a stockpot and feeds a crowd. The quantities and the boiling time are the two things to reckon with before you start.
- Half a peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck is 4 dry quarts: roughly 6 to 7 lb of tomatoes, and something on the order of 3 lb of okra before trimming. Quartering the whole recipe gives about 1½ lb tomatoes and a large handful of okra, which suits a 6-quart pot.
- OchraSimply okra, in the older spelling. Shredding it fine, as directed, is what thickens this gumbo — there is no filé and no roux here, so the okra's mucilage does most of the work, with the egg yolks finishing it.
- Porcelain kettleEnameled cast iron or stainless steel. The instruction is about acid: tomatoes, vinegar and lemon juice will strip a bare iron or copper pot and take on a metallic taste.
- Ham gravyNot a made sauce but the fat and browned drippings left from frying ham. Render 3 or 4 oz of diced country ham or thick bacon, brown the chicken pieces in the fat, and you have the same thing.
- Boil four or five hoursFar longer than needed now. An hour of gentle simmering after the chicken goes in cooks it through and softens the okra; beyond that the okra collapses and the tomato goes flat and jammy.
- The egg and vinegar liaisonFour yolks beaten with vinegar and lemon juice will curdle instantly in a boiling pot. Temper them with a ladle of hot broth, stir them in off the heat at the very end, and do not let the soup return to a boil.
- ChickenUse a 3 to 4 lb bird cut into serving pieces, or the equivalent in thighs. The original assumes bone-in, which is worth keeping for the body it gives the broth.
- YieldThe recipe names no vessel, so the finished volume can only be guessed; it is plainly meant for a crowd. Quartered, it makes six to eight bowls served over rice.
This is gumbo in its older, roux-less form, where okra does the thickening — the word itself is generally traced to a Bantu term for the okra pod, ki ngombo. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks collected such recipes from correspondents, and an unsigned attribution of this kind is common in community-compiled charity cookbooks. The egg-yolk-and-lemon finish sits closer to the older European tradition of thickening a fricassee with yolks than to later Louisiana practice. The scale — half a peck of this, half a peck of that — points to a large kettle and a household of many.