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Chicken Okra, Bearnaise
Singe, cut off the head and feet of a very small, tender fowl, draw, wipe and cut it in half-inch pieces (meat and bones), place in a saucepan with a chopped onion, one chopped, seeded green pepper, two minced leeks and two branches of celery cut in small squares; add two tablespoons melted butter, cook for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile, then add a finely chopped bean garlic and a teaspoon chopped parsley. Stir well, then moisten with two and a half quarts broth, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, and let boil fifteen minutes.
Trim twelve good-sized, fresh, tender okras, cut them in half-inch pieces and add to the soup, with two peeled and crushed fresh red tomatoes, then let boil for twenty-five minutes longer. Cut two peeled, well-washed, small, raw potatoes in quarter-inch-square pieces, add to the soup, boil for thirty minutes, add two gills hot tomato sauce, mix well, skim the fat from the surface, pour the soup into a soup tureen and serve.
A gumbo-style chicken and okra soup from the era when a cook was expected to butcher the bird herself. The method is sound; the clock is the part that needs judgment.
- The hinge: when the okra goes inAs written the okra boils 55 minutes and disintegrates, which is what thickens the soup in the Creole manner. If you want recognizable pieces of okra, hold half back and add it in the last 10 minutes.
- "A very small, tender fowl"Probably a bird of a couple of pounds, young enough that a little over an hour's simmering leaves the meat intact. A supermarket broiler-fryer works; an actual stewing fowl is far tougher and older than what is meant here.
- Cut through the boneThe half-inch pieces include bone deliberately — marrow and cartilage give the broth body. Use a cleaver or heavy knife, and expect to fish out splinters at table, or cut the bird into ordinary joints instead and accept a thinner result.
- "A bean garlic"Most likely a literal rendering of the French gousse d'ail (gousse being a pod or husk): one clove of garlic, not a head.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of tomato sauce is one cup. Use a plain cooked tomato sauce, not a seasoned pasta sauce.
- Leeks and celery"Two branches of celery" means two ribs. Wash the leeks in several changes of water after slicing; grit settles into the soup and never leaves.
- SkimmingTwo tablespoons of butter plus chicken fat will pool on the surface after an hour. Skim it properly, or chill the pot and lift the cap of fat off — the soup tastes cleaner for it.
- YieldTwo and a half quarts of broth plus vegetables and a cup of tomato sauce gives roughly three quarts, less whatever boils away, or about eight generous servings as a first course.
The name is the giveaway that this is a restaurant cook's soup rather than a household one: Alexander Filippini's book labels dishes by garnish and style, and "Béarnaise" here is plainly not the egg-and-tarragon sauce that shares the name, though what it was meant to signal is unclear. The okra itself came to American cooking from West Africa with the transatlantic slave trade, and its Bantu-derived name ngombo is generally traced as the source of the word gumbo; by the time this book appeared in 1906, okra soup thickened by long boiling was firmly established in Louisiana and had traveled up to the big-city restaurant repertoire, where it was given a French dress and a French name.