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Chicken Okra, Chasseur
Cut off head and feet of a small, tender fowl, draw, tear off meat from breast and legs, remove skin and bone, then cut meat into half-inch pieces. Place in a saucepan with one ounce raw ham, one good-sized white onion, one green pepper, two leeks and four well peeled and cleaned fresh mushrooms, all cut in small squares. Add two tablespoons melted butter and briskly brown on the range for ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Moisten with four pints water and one and half pints pure tomato juice, add the fowl carcass and let boil for thirty-five minutes; add one ounce cooked, smoked beef tongue, twelve trimmed fresh okras cut in half-inch pieces, two ounces Carolina rice, a bean chopped garlic, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, level teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; let slowly simmer for forty-five minutes more, take up the carcass, skim the fat from the surface, pour the soup into a tureen and serve.
A large okra-and-rice chicken soup built on a carcass broth, closer to a Creole gumbo than to anything French. Almost everything in it is still available; the language and the proportions are what need translating.
- The okra is the hingeTwelve okra cut into half-inch pieces and simmered 45 minutes will fall apart and leave the soup slick and stringy. Add them in the last 15 to 20 minutes instead, and keep the pot at a bare simmer rather than a boil.
- "A small, tender fowl"A 2 1/2 to 3 lb chicken, sold ready-drawn. Buy it whole rather than in parts so you have the carcass, which is the entire point of the first stage; cut the breast and thigh meat into half-inch dice and reserve the bones.
- "A bean chopped garlic"Period shorthand for a piece of garlic about the size of a bean, chopped; in practice roughly one small clove. It is genuinely imprecise; a single clove is a fair reading.
- Carolina riceA long-grain white rice, the name associated with the South Carolina lowcountry crop and by this date also used as a trade term for the type. Any long-grain white rice works. Two ounces is about 1/3 cup dry, which is right for a soup rather than a pilaf.
- Ham and tongueThe ounce of raw ham is there for fat and salt at the browning stage; a thick slice of unsmoked prosciutto or a scrap of fresh pork belly does the same. Cooked smoked tongue is a deli item now rather than a pantry staple, and an ounce of smoked ham hock meat or good bacon covers its function.
- Heat and vessel"Briskly brown on the range" means medium-high in a wide, heavy pot, uncovered, ten minutes with occasional stirring. Everything is cooked on the stovetop; no oven is involved.
- Liquid and yieldFour pints water plus a pint and a half of tomato juice is 5 1/2 pints of liquid, reducing over 80 minutes to something like four pints of finished soup. That serves eight to ten as a first course. Use unsalted tomato juice or hold back on the teaspoon of salt until the end.
- Skim twiceA whole bird's carcass in four pints of water and a pint and a half of tomato juice throws a good deal of fat. Skim once when the broth first comes up to a boil and again after the carcass comes out, or the surface will be a slick of chicken fat.
The name is a small piece of restaurant bilingualism: chasseur is French for hunter, a term attached to dishes finished with mushrooms, and the mushrooms are duly present, but the okra, tomato, rice and browned ham place this squarely in the Creole soup tradition of the Gulf Coast. Okra reached the Americas with the Atlantic slave trade from West Africa, where its mucilage was already valued as a thickener, and the word is generally traced to Igbo okuru; in New Orleans it gave both the body and, by way of Bantu ki ngombo, arguably the name to gumbo. Books of this kind, compiled for a professional kitchen readership, often dressed regional American dishes in French service titles because that was the language of the dining room. The frugality is period-typical too: the carcass goes into the pot and stays there through both stages, some eighty minutes in all, before being lifted out ahead of service, and an ounce each of ham and tongue does the seasoning work that a modern cook would look to stock for.