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Gumbo, Arlequin
Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a saucepan, add half a pound raw veal, one sound green pepper, one Spanish onion, two leeks and two ounces of raw ham, all cut in quarter-inch-pieces, and gently brown ten minutes, mixing well meanwhile. Moisten with two quarts broth one quart tomato juice, adding one pound clean, raw chicken bones (if at hand). Season with a good teaspoon salt, a teaspoon sugar, half teaspoon pepper and saltspoon of Spanish saffron, lightly mix and let boil twenty minutes. Add two ounces raw rice and boil twenty minutes more. Trim and cut twelve fresh okras in quarter-inch pieces and add to soup with three Spanish sweet peppers cut in lozenge pieces, then boil forty-five minutes longer. Remove chicken bones, pick off leaves from two branches chervil and add to soup, lightly mix. Pour soup into a tureen and serve.
A composed soup rather than a Louisiana gumbo: no roux, no filé, and saffron doing the work that cayenne would do further south. Two things need attention before you start — the total simmering time and the quantity of liquid.
- YieldThree quarts of liquid before reduction, so eight to ten bowls as a first course. It is a soup, not a main dish; the veal and ham are seasoning meats cut small, not portions.
- Saltspoon of saffronA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. That is a large amount of saffron by volume — measure it as a generous pinch of threads, crumbled and steeped in a spoonful of the hot broth, rather than packing a quarter-teaspoon measure with whole threads.
- Spanish sweet peppersMost likely pimientos — squat, thick-walled, deep red and much sweeter than a bell pepper. If you use jarred pimientos, drain them and add in the last fifteen minutes rather than boiling them the full forty-five, since they are already cooked.
- The rice will not survive 65 minutesAs written the rice boils twenty minutes, then another forty-five with the okra. It disintegrates and thickens the soup into porridge. Either accept that and treat it as a body-building starch, or hold the rice back and add it forty-five minutes later so it finishes with the okra.
- Okra timingForty-five minutes of boiling breaks okra down and releases its mucilage, which is the point here — it is the thickener in place of a roux. If you want the pods to hold their shape, cut them larger and give them twenty minutes, but the soup will be thinner.
- Chicken bones"If at hand" means a pound of raw carcass, backs or wings from a bird broken down at home. They enrich the broth with gelatin. If you are using a good homemade stock already, skip them; with commercial boxed broth they make a real difference.
- ChervilSold fresh only in spring and early summer in most places and it wilts within days. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves is the standard substitute; add off the heat, as chervil's anise note vanishes with cooking.
- A "sound" green pepperPeriod phrasing for unblemished and firm, with no soft spots. It carries no instruction beyond choosing a good one.
- SkimmingRaw veal, ham and bones will throw a grey scum in the first ten minutes after the broth goes in. Take it off before the rice goes in or it clouds the soup and dulls the saffron colour.
The name points away from New Orleans and toward the professional French kitchen: arlequin, harlequin, was a recognised if loose term in classical cookery for a dish of many small pieces in many colours, and that is exactly what this is — green pepper, red pimiento, white leek, pink ham, yellow saffron rice. What survives of gumbo proper is the okra, whose name is generally traced to a West African source, though a Choctaw derivation has also been argued; what has gone is the roux, the filé and the cayenne. In their place is saffron, which puts the soup closer to a Spanish or Provençal fish stew than to anything on the Gulf Coast. The result is less a gumbo than a demonstration of how loosely American cookbooks of the period used the word.