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Gumbo Lie with Asparagus
Thoroughly wash a bunch of green asparagus, cut in small pieces, and place in a saucepan with a pint and a half water, one sliced onion, two branches parsley, one clove, half a teaspoon salt and one teaspoon sugar; lightly mix, then let boil forty-five minutes, press through a sieve into a small saucepan and keep hot.
Cut into small dice pieces one onion, two green peppers, two leeks, two ounces lean raw ham, a boned raw leg of a fowl (if handy) and two ounces lean raw veal; place these in a saucepan with half ounce butter and lightly brown ten minutes, occasionally stirring, then pour in three pints broth, one quart water; boil fifteen minutes, add three tablespoons raw rice, boil ten minutes. Then add twelve well-trimmed fresh okras cut in half-inch pieces, and two medium, fresh red tomatoes, each cut in eight pieces. Season with a teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper, and slowly boil for forty minutes. Pour the asparagus puree into this pan, mix well with wooden spoon for a minute, then boil five minutes more, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A large, two-stage soup: an asparagus puree made separately and stirred into a gumbo built on diced meats, okra and rice. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities and the boiling times both belong to another era.
- The hinge: add the puree at the endThe asparagus puree goes in only for the last five minutes. Boiled longer it loses its green flavour and the whole pot turns a dull olive, which defeats the point of making it separately.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper. With the teaspoon and a half of salt called for across the two pans, taste before committing to all of it, particularly if you use commercial broth rather than an unsalted homemade one.
- Total yieldThree pints broth plus a quart of water plus a pint and a half in the asparagus pan is about six and a half pints, roughly three-quarters of a gallon, before reduction. Expect eight to ten generous servings; halve everything for a household pot.
- The asparagus, and the sieveForty-five minutes will reduce asparagus to threads, which is what you want for pressing through a sieve. A blender or food mill does the same job in seconds, but pass it through a sieve afterwards anyway to catch the fibrous strings.
- Okra and the forty-minute boilForty minutes of slow boiling breaks the okra down and releases its mucilage, which is exactly how this soup is thickened. If you want the okra to hold its shape, add it in the last fifteen minutes and accept a thinner body.
- A boned raw leg of a fowlOne chicken leg, skinned and boned, cut into dice; roughly four ounces of meat. The recipe treats it as optional, and the ham and veal carry the dish without it.
- The riceThree tablespoons of raw rice boiled for a further fifty-five minutes will disintegrate almost entirely into the broth. That appears to be intentional here, adding starch rather than texture; if you want visible grains, cook the rice separately and spoon it into the bowls.
- Browning the meatsHalf an ounce of butter for that much diced meat and vegetable is very little. Use a wide pan so everything is in one layer, and take the ten minutes at a real heat: this is the only browning in the recipe and most of the depth comes from it.
The odd title is most likely French rather than misprinted English: this gumbo is arguably bound twice over, by the okra's mucilage and by the asparagus puree stirred in at the finish. The recipe is characteristic of the grand-hotel cooking that The International Cook Book collected, generally credited to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York. Note what is absent: no roux, no filé, no shellfish, and the okra doing all the thickening work. Louisiana gumbo had been travelling into northern restaurant kitchens since the late nineteenth century, and dishes like this show it arriving as a template — a name and an okra-thickened pot — onto which a French-trained chef grafted a spring vegetable puree that sits some distance from Creole practice.