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Gumbo, Creole
Cut into small squares one green pepper, one medium white onion, two leeks, one ounce lean raw ham and two ounces lean raw veal. Place all in a saucepan on the fire with half ounce melted butter; stir well and let cook for six minutes. Moisten with three quarts hot water. Season with two teaspoons salt, cover the pan and let slowly boil for twenty-five minutes. Skim the fat from the surface of the broth, add one tablespoon raw rice, cover the pan again and boil for twenty minutes. Then add twelve sound, good-sized, fresh, neatly trimmed okras, cut into pieces quarter of an inch thick, and two medium peeled red tomatoes cut into eight equal pieces each. Cover the pan and boil for thirty minutes longer. Skim off the fat, pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
This is a soup-style gumbo with no roux and no filé, built on three quarts of water and about three ounces of meat used purely as seasoning. It reads thin to modern eyes, and it is: expect a clear, brothy soup thickened only by okra and a spoonful of rice.
- YieldThree quarts of liquid will reduce somewhat over the 75 minutes of boiling the recipe specifies, enough for eight modest first-course servings. The original gives no yield.
- The meat is a flavouring, not a fillingOne ounce of ham and two of veal in three quarts of liquid function as seasoning. If you want a substantial gumbo, this is not that recipe.
- Okra timingThirty minutes of boiling will break the okra down entirely, which is how the soup gets its body. Cooks who dislike the viscous texture should add the okra in the last ten minutes instead, but they will lose most of the thickening.
- No filé, no rouxMany gumbo recipes of this period call for filé powder or a browned flour base. This one uses neither, so there is no risk of the soup going ropy from boiled filé — and no reason to add flour at the end.
- Veal'Lean raw veal' here would most likely be shoulder or leg trim. Boneless pork shoulder or chicken thigh behaves similarly in a long simmer if veal is hard to source.
- SkimmingThe instruction to skim twice matters more than it sounds. Half an ounce of butter plus ham fat rises as a slick that dulls the broth; pulling it off keeps the soup clean-tasting.
- Seasoning at the endTwo teaspoons of salt goes in at the start, when there are three quarts of liquid. After reduction, taste again before serving and correct — the original assumes a cook who does this without being told.
Creole gumbo in a book called The International Cook Book is New Orleans presented to the rest of America as one of the world's cuisines — a sign that by the early twentieth century Louisiana cooking was read as regional-exotic rather than simply domestic. The word gumbo is generally traced to West African terms for okra (Bantu ki-ngombo), and okra is the thickener here. What is striking is how French the method is: a small mirepoix of pepper, onion and leek sweated in butter, moistened with water, seasoned, skimmed, with the rice going in mid-cooking, before the okra and tomato — the construction of a Parisian potage with Louisiana ingredients dropped in.