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Chicken Okra, Turque
Singe, draw and bone a small, tender fowl. Cut meat in half-inch pieces, cut also liver and heart. (if another chicken liver is on hand, cut it and add to the other.) Cut white parts of three leeks in very small squares, also two white onions and two seeded green peppers in same way. Place above articles in a saucepan with ounce butter and nicely brown for ten minutes, occasionally stirring. Add half teaspoon curry powder, stir well, moisten with two quarts broth a pint and a half water and one gill demi-glace. Season with good teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg. Add the carcass of the fowl, except head, cover pan and boil thirty minutes. Add three ounces raw rice, boil fifteen minutes, then add twelve trimmed, sound, fresh okras, cut in half-inch pieces, and one peeled tomato, cut in eight pieces. Boil forty minutes, remove carcass, skim fat from surface, add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A boned fowl soup thickened by long-cooked rice and okra, built on a French base of butter-browned aromatics and demi-glace. Most of what needs translating here is the vessel, the stock, and the very long boil.
- The birdA "small, tender fowl" here is likely a young chicken of around 3 lb. Bone it raw and keep the carcass for the pot; the recipe's only exclusion is the head (the gall bladder is discarded as a matter of course when drawing). The liver and heart go in with the meat.
- MeasuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. Three ounces of raw rice is a scant half cup; an ounce of butter is two tablespoons.
- Demi-glaceA reduced, thickened brown veal stock, now sold as a concentrate in tubs or jars. Half a cup of good store-bought demi-glace, or an equal amount of well-reduced brown stock, does the job.
- Liquid and yieldTwo quarts broth, a pint and a half of water and a half cup of demi-glace gives just under three quarts before reduction. Expect eight to ten soup portions; the pan needs at least a 6-quart capacity.
- The rice timingThe rice goes in after the first thirty-minute boil and then cooks fifty-five minutes in all: fifteen minutes before the okra and tomato, forty after. At that length it disintegrates and thickens the soup. If you want distinct grains, add the rice with the okra instead and accept a thinner broth.
- The okraForty minutes of boiling leaves okra very soft and releases its mucilage, which is what binds this soup. Do not treat that as a fault. Cut the pods only after washing and drying them, and trim the caps without cutting into the seed cavity if you want less slip.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt is light for close to three quarts, particularly if the broth is unsalted. Season at the end, after the carcass comes out and the fat is skimmed, and taste before the parsley goes in.
- SkimmingChill the finished soup if time allows; the fat lifts off in a sheet far more cleanly than skimming hot. Reheat gently so the rice does not catch.
Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) attaches national labels to dishes for American readers, and "Turque" appears to be doing that work here: okra is long established in Ottoman and Turkish cooking as bamya. The rest of the construction is thoroughly French -- butter-browned aromatics, demi-glace, a carcass simmered in the pot for body -- and the half-teaspoon of curry powder reads as a general period gesture toward "the East" rather than anything specifically Turkish. The result sits in the same family as the okra soups and gumbos appearing in American cookbooks at the time, which rely on the same thickening trick.