Home › The World's Kitchen › Chicken Okra, Cocoanut
Chicken Okra, Cocoanut
Half a boned fowl, one each small carrot, white turnip and onion, half a green pepper, two leeks, two tablespoons raw rice, three quarts-hot water, four small, peeled red tomatoes and twelve good-sized, fresh okras. Cut the fowl into small square pieces; cut also the carrot, turnip, onion, green pepper and leeks into half-inch-square pieces, place in a saucepan with one ounce butter and slowly brown for ten minutes, lightly stirring once in a while; then add the rice and any raw chicken bones on hand, lightly mix and moisten with the hot water. Season with a level tablespoon salt, cover the pan and let boil for thirty minutes. Cut the tomatoes and okras into small pieces and add them to the soup, then boil for thirty minutes more. Remove the bones, add the milk and the shredded meat of a medium cocoanut, mix well, let boil for ten minutes more, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A chicken-and-okra soup finished with coconut milk and shredded coconut meat. The ingredient list omits the coconut that the method calls for, so read both before shopping.
- The missing ingredient"Add the milk and the shredded meat of a medium cocoanut" appears only in the method. The milk is coconut, not dairy; most likely the liquid drained from the nut, though milk pressed from the grated flesh would also answer. A 13-14 oz can of coconut milk plus 1 to 1 1/2 cups unsweetened grated coconut stands in for one medium nut.
- Half a boned fowlA fowl was an older laying hen, tougher and more flavorful than a broiler. Half of one is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of meat; boneless thighs give the closest texture, and the recipe's instruction to throw in "any raw chicken bones on hand" is what supplies the body of the broth.
- Cut sizesThe vegetables go in half-inch dice; the fowl is only described as "small square pieces." Even cutting matters here because the meat and vegetables brown together in butter for ten minutes before any liquid arrives.
- SaltA level tablespoon of salt for three quarts is defensible if you are also adding unsalted bones, but salt in stages instead and taste at the end, since the liquid reduces over seventy minutes.
- Okra and going ropyThe okra goes in only for the last forty minutes, and that is deliberate. Cutting okra into small pieces releases its mucilage, which thickens the soup; if you want less of that, add the pods later and cook them briefly, or brown the cut okra separately first.
- Coconut at the endTen minutes of boiling after the coconut milk goes in is the outer limit. Boiled hard or held long, coconut milk splits into oil and solids, so keep it at a bare simmer and serve promptly.
- RiceTwo tablespoons of raw rice cooked for over an hour will collapse into the broth rather than staying in distinct grains. Do not increase it.
- YieldThree quarts of water plus vegetables and coconut milk gives about eight to ten servings as a first course.
This belongs to the family of okra soups that spread with West African cookery through the Caribbean and the American South; the name okra is generally traced to Igbo, and gumbo to a Bantu word for the same plant. What marks this version as tropical rather than Creole is the finish of coconut milk and grated coconut, a combination common in Caribbean and Brazilian cooking but rare in the Gulf states, where the thickener is roux or file. The International Cook Book by Filippini, sometime chef of Delmonico's, was assembled to give American households a survey of national styles, and pages like this one collect dishes by their national or regional label; the pairing of a French mirepoix browned in butter with okra and coconut is characteristic of how such compilations passed foreign dishes through a professional restaurant technique. Canned coconut milk was not available to the period cook, which is why the recipe expects the cook to extract both the liquid and the meat from a whole nut.