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Gombo, Egyptienne
Cut in small dice pieces a boned, raw half fowl, quarter of a pound raw veal, three well-cleaned leeks, one medium sized white onion, one seedless green pepper and two branches well-cleaned, crisp celery. Place these in a saucepan with one tablespoon butter and gently brown for ten minutes, being careful to stir with a wooden spoon once in a while. Moisten with three quarts hot water and one gill tomato sauce add the left-over half fowl, season with one and a half good teaspoons salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Cover pan and let simmer fortyfive minutes, then add two crushed, peeled tomatoes and twelve trimmed fresh okras cut in quarter of an inch pieces. Open and thoroughly drain on a sieve a third of a pint corn, add to the soup with one teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and a bean finely chopped garlic, mix well and let boil for fifty minutes longer. Remove fowl and keep for further use, skim fat from soup, pour into a soup tureen and serve very hot.
A long-simmered okra soup built on a whole bird, half of it diced into the pot and half poached in it for flavour. The instructions are clear enough; the units and the bird are what need translating.
- Fowl means a stewing henA "fowl" in this period was a mature laying hen, typically 4-5 lb, tough and deeply flavoured, which is why it can stand the hour and a half of simmering the recipe asks for. A supermarket roasting chicken of similar weight works, but the poached half will be falling apart by the end rather than sliceable.
- Half diced, half wholeOnly the boned half is cut up and browned. The other half goes in with the water and acts as stock; it is lifted out at the end and "kept for further use" — chicken salad, croquettes, hash. Plan on using it.
- A gillHalf a cup. Tomato sauce here means a plain cooked tomato sauce or purée, not a seasoned pasta sauce.
- "A bean" of garlicAn old measure meaning a piece about the size of a bean, so rather less than a whole clove. The garlic is a background note, not a flavour.
- A third of a pint of cornRoughly two-thirds of a cup, drained. The original assumes canned corn, hence "open and thoroughly drain"; frozen kernels are a direct substitute.
- The final fifty minutesThat is a long time for cut okra, and it is deliberate — the okra breaks down and thickens the broth, which is the whole point of a gombo made without roux or filé. Keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, and do not expect the okra pieces to hold their shape.
- Skim seriouslyBrowning in butter plus a whole bird's worth of fat leaves a good deal on the surface. Skimming, or chilling and lifting the fat, makes the difference between a clean soup and a greasy one.
- YieldThree quarts of water plus the vegetables gives about 10 to 12 cups of finished soup, or eight to ten servings as a first course.
Gombo is the older French-Louisiana spelling of gumbo, and the word is generally traced to a Bantu name for okra — ki ngombo — carried into the Americas with the West African slave trade; in the nineteenth century it referred as much to the thickened okra soup itself as to the pod. What is striking here is how far the dish has travelled from New Orleans: there is no roux, no filé, no shellfish, no cayenne, and the seasoning is salt and white pepper in the manner of a French restaurant kitchen. The suffix Egyptienne belongs to the same habit of classical French menu naming that produced dozens of national epithets in hotel cookery of the period, often attached loosely to a dish containing okra, rice or lentils rather than to any Egyptian original.