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Chicken Gumbo, St. German
Totally bone and remove skin from a small, tender fowl and cut meat into half-inch-square pieces. Chop two medium white onions, two leeks, two seeded, sound green peppers and two ounces raw lean ham, place these in a saucepan with two tablespoons melted butter and gently brown for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Moisten with three quarts water, add bones only of fowl, season with a teaspoon and a half salt, half teaspoon pepper, and boil for twenty minutes. Add a half pint shelled green peas and boil for fifteen minutes, then add the cut-up meat, two ounces raw rice, twelve fresh, trimmed okras cut in half-inch pieces and two peeled, seeded tomatoes cut the same size. Slowly boil for forty-five minutes, take up bones, skim fat from surface, pour the soup into a tureen and serve.
A clear, broth-style gumbo with no roux and no filé — the okra and rice do all the thickening. The main adjustment is timing: as written, the chicken meat, peas and okra all spend far longer in the pot than they need.
- The fowlA "small, tender fowl" suggests a young bird, boned raw; a modern chicken of about 3 to 3½ lb is a fair stand-in. Keep the carcass, since the bones are the only stock ingredient — there is no other broth here, just the bones simmered with the browned vegetables and ham.
- Timing the meatHalf-inch pieces of raw chicken breast and thigh are done in 10 to 15 minutes. Forty-five minutes of boiling will leave them dry and stringy. Build the broth and cook the rice and okra first, then drop the meat in for the last quarter hour.
- The peasFresh shelled green peas boiled fifteen minutes, then a further forty-five, are a purée. Half a pint shelled is about a cup, roughly 5 oz; frozen peas added in the final five minutes give what the recipe was actually after.
- OkraTwelve pods cut in half-inch rounds will release their mucilage over a long simmer, which is the point — it is the only thickener in the pot. Keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil so the rounds hold together.
- RiceTwo ounces of raw rice is a scant third of a cup. It swells considerably over three quarts of liquid and keeps swelling in the tureen, so the soup will be noticeably thicker at the table than in the pot.
- Raw lean hamThis most likely means uncooked cured ham — a piece of country ham or a prosciutto end, not deli ham. It is there mainly for salt, so taste before adding the full teaspoon and a half.
- LeeksUse white and pale green parts, split lengthwise and washed thoroughly; grit in the layers is the usual failure. Two leeks with two onions makes for a sweeter base than onion alone.
- YieldThree quarts of water will reduce somewhat over the eighty minutes of boiling; expect somewhere in the region of two and a half quarts of finished soup, enough for roughly eight first-course servings or five or six as a meal.
The tag St. German is almost certainly à la Saint-Germain, the standard French kitchen shorthand for a dish containing green peas, generally traced to the gardens around Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside Paris. That may explain the half pint of peas sitting incongruously among the okra and rice: this looks like a Creole gumbo passed through a classically trained hotel kitchen and given a French garnish name, though that reading is speculation. Also notable is what is missing — there is no roux, no filé powder, no shellfish and no cayenne, though okra gumbos without any of them were a real tradition in their own right. What remains is the okra, which is the older of the two thickening traditions and the one that gives gumbo its name, generally traced to West African words for the pod.