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Gumbo, Lie Parmentier
Heat in a small saucepan two tablespoons butter, adding two sliced leeks, one ounce salt pork cut into small pieces and one bay leaf; stir well with a wooden spoon and let slowly brown for five minutes. Moisten with a pint of broth or hot water, add three medium-sized, peeled, well-washed and sliced potatoes. Season with two saltspoons salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Cover the pan and let gently simmer for forty-five minutes. Press through a sieve, then strain through a Chinese strainer into another pan and keep on the corner of the range without boiling.
Cut into small dice pieces one onion, two green peppers, two leeks, two ounces lean, raw ham, a boned leg of fowl, if handy, and two ounces lean, raw veal. Place these in a saucepan with half ounce butter; stir well with a wooden spoon and cook for eight minutes, occasionally stirring; then pour in two and a half quarts broth or hot water and boil for fifteen minutes. Add three tablespoons raw rice and boil for ten minutes. Then add twelve well-trimmed fresh okras, cut in half-inch slices, and two medium, peeled, red tomatoes, each cut into eight pieces. Season with one teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Slowly boil for forty minutes. Pour the potato puree into this pan, mix well with a wooden spoon for one minute, boil for five minutes more, pour into a hot tureen and serve.
Two soups built separately and married at the end: a leek-and-potato purée in the French manner, and an okra gumbo. The title is garbled printer's French — lié means bound or thickened, and Parmentier means with potato, so this is a gumbo thickened with potato purée rather than with roux or filé.
- The hingeThe potato purée goes in at the very end and gets only five minutes of boiling. Adding it early, or letting it sit over direct heat, gives a gluey, starchy body instead of a soup that is merely velvety. Hold it warm off the burner, as the recipe says, and stir it in last.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the potato base takes 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon white pepper; the gumbo pot takes 1 teaspoon salt plus 1/2 teaspoon pepper. Salt pork and raw ham both contribute more, so hold back and correct at the end.
- "Corner of the range"On a coal range the cooler edge of the top plate held things near-simmering indefinitely. Use the lowest burner setting, a flame tamer, or simply cover the pan and let it sit off the heat.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the fine conical sieve. The two-stage straining, coarse sieve first and fine cone second, is what makes the purée smooth; a food mill followed by a fine-mesh strainer does the same work.
- Okra and rice timingForty minutes of boiling collapses fresh okra entirely and turns three tablespoons of rice to paste, which is arguably the point in a bound soup. If you want the okra to hold its shape, add it in the last 10 to 12 minutes and accept a thinner broth.
- Boned leg of fowlMeat cut from a raw chicken leg; the recipe gives no weight. Filippini's "if handy" suggests it was an optional use of what the kitchen had; skip it or use a thigh.
- YieldTwo and a half quarts of broth plus the pint of potato base, less whatever boils away over more than an hour of open boiling; enough for eight or so as a first course.
- Fat and salt porkOne ounce of salt pork is a flavour base, not a quantity of meat. Blanch it briefly if it is very salty, and dice it small enough to render in the five minutes allowed.
"Parmentier" on a French menu always signals potato, after Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the eighteenth-century agronomist generally credited with persuading the French that the potato was fit for people rather than livestock. Grafting that name onto gumbo is exactly the kind of thing this book does: Alexander Filippini cooked for decades at Delmonico's in New York, where Creole dishes arrived as fashionable novelties and were promptly rebuilt on classical French lines. A New Orleans cook would thicken gumbo with a dark roux, with filé, or with okra alone; here okra is treated as a vegetable among others and the binding is done by a purée of leeks and potatoes — essentially a potage Parmentier used as a liaison. The result belongs less to Louisiana than to the international hotel kitchen of 1900, which took a regional name, kept the okra and the rice, and made the body of the soup French.</p>