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Chicken Gumbo, Piedmontaise
Cut off the head, draw and wipe a small tender fowl, totally bone it, free meat from skin, then cut fowl in half-inch square pieces; cut also in small squares two white medium onions, two seedless green peppers, two well-cleaned leeks, two ounces raw ham and four branches crisp, well-cleaned celery. Heat one and a half tablespoons butter in a saucepan, add the above and gently brown for ten minutes, frequently stirring with wooden spoon. Moisten with three quarts hot water, add the fowl bones, one level tablespoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper, and let boil thirty minutes. Cut two ounces good raw Italian macaroni in half-inch pieces, add to soup, boil twenty minutes more, then add two ounces Piedmont raw rice, two peeled, crushed tomatoes and twelve small trimmed fresh okras cut in half-inch pieces; lightly mix and let boil for forty minutes longer, remove bones, add leaves from two branches chervil, boil for five minutes more, pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A gumbo in name and okra only — this is a long-simmered Italian-leaning soup built on a whole boned fowl. The cumulative cooking time is the thing to watch: the timings add up to about ninety-five minutes of boiling, which is more than the chicken, the macaroni or the rice can survive.
- Rebuild the timelineSimmer the vegetable base and the bones for the full 30 minutes to get stock, but hold the diced chicken back and add it in the last 15 minutes. Boned half-inch pieces of fowl are cooked through in a few minutes and turn to string after an hour and a half.
- Macaroni and riceCut macaroni boiled for a full hour will dissolve. Add the rice about 18 minutes from the end and the macaroni about 10, or cook both separately and stir them in at the finish so the broth stays clear.
- "Piedmont raw rice"Short-grain northern Italian rice — carnaroli, arborio or vialone nano. Any of the three works; long-grain rice will not give the same faintly starchy body.
- A small tender fowl"Fowl" often meant an older bird, but "small tender" here signals a young one. A 3 to 3 1/2 lb chicken is right. Bone it, keep the carcass for the pot, and discard the skin as instructed or the soup will be greasy.
- Seedless green peppersThis simply means green bell peppers with the seeds and ribs removed, not a distinct variety.
- OkraTwelve small pods, trimmed of stem and tip. Cut okra releases mucilage into the broth, which is the point in a gumbo; if you want less body, add it whole and remove the pods before serving.
- ChervilAdd off the heat rather than boiling five minutes — its anise note goes flat fast. If chervil is unavailable, a mix of flat-leaf parsley with a very little tarragon is the usual stand-in.
- YieldThree quarts of water plus the solids gives roughly 8 to 10 soup-plate servings. It is a first course, not a stew, despite the name.
"Gumbo" reached international cookbooks by way of New Orleans, where the word is generally traced to a West African name for okra, and by the early twentieth century hotel kitchens applied it loosely to almost any thickened okra soup. This version carries the suffix piedmontaise, which in French kitchen usage points to Piedmont and most often to rice from there (classically a risotto, frequently with truffles) — the rice-growing plain around Vercelli and Novara supplies much of Italy's risotto grain — and the macaroni and tomato reinforce the Italian gesture. The combination is characteristic of the grand-hotel cooking of the period, where a repertoire was assembled by pairing a familiar dish name with a regional garnish, and of The International Cook Book in particular, whose author, Alexander Filippini, spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York and wrote for cooks expected to bone a fowl without being told how.