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Gumbo with Frogs' Legs
Cut into small squares two white onions, the white parts two leeks, two sound, green peppers, three branches well-washed celery; place these in a large saucepan with one and a half tablespoons melted butter and brown for ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Moisten with three quarts water, season with a tablespoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Add two heads fresh fish, salmon, cod, sheepshead, or any other kind, cover the pan and let gently boil for forty minutes. Remove the heads with a skimmer, then add four small, fresh, peeled red tomatoes cut into eight pieces each, twelve fresh, sound, trimmed okras cut into quarter-inch pieces, and two tablespoons raw rice. Cover the pan again and let cook for twenty-five minutes. Plunge three-quarters of a pound fresh frogs' legs into boiling water for three minutes; remove, drain, pick off all the meat from them and add to the soup, with a teaspoon of freshly chopped parsley; mix a little, boil for ten minutes and serve in a soup tureen.
A Creole-style gumbo built on a fish-head broth rather than a roux, with okra and a spoonful of rice doing all the thickening. The whole dish rests on getting a good stock out of the heads, so start there.
- Fish headsTwo large heads; ask at a fish counter or an Asian market, and have the gills removed. Sheepshead is a Gulf and South Atlantic member of the porgy family and is uncommon in markets outside the South — snapper, grouper, cod or salmon heads all work. Rinse away any blood so the broth stays clean-tasting.
- Forty minutes is long for fishModern stock practice usually pulls fish bones at 20 to 30 minutes. Keep the pot at a bare simmer rather than the "gentle boil" called for, and taste at the 30-minute mark.
- Frogs' legsSold frozen in many Asian and Southern markets; the picked meat will amount to well under half the weight of the legs. The three-minute blanch is only to firm the flesh for picking, and the final ten minutes of simmering finishes it. Boneless chicken thigh, cut small, is a common stand-in.
- Green peppersHere this means green bell peppers, not chilies. Onion, celery and green pepper are the combination later known as the Creole trinity, though this recipe adds leek as well.
- The rice is a thickenerTwo tablespoons of raw rice in three quarts of broth gives a scattering of grains and some body rather than a rice soup. If you want a rice gumbo, serve the soup over separately cooked rice instead of increasing this amount.
- OkraTwelve pods cut in quarter-inch rounds. Sliced okra releases mucilage as it cooks, which is the point in a gumbo of this style — no filé is used here, so do not try to cook the ropiness out. Frozen cut okra is an acceptable substitute out of season.
- SeasoningA tablespoon of salt for three quarts is reasonable for an unsalted homemade broth, but add half at the start and correct at the end, since the liquid reduces over more than an hour of cooking.
- YieldAbout three quarts before reduction, so eight to ten first-course servings from a soup tureen, or six as a main course with bread.
Gumbo takes its name from a West African word for okra — generally traced to Bantu forms such as ki ngombo — and this is the okra-thickened kind rather than the filé-thickened one associated with Choctaw practice. What is striking about this version is how much it behaves like a French restaurant soup: a vegetable base sweated in butter, a stock drawn from fish heads, a scatter of rice for body, and frogs' legs blanched and picked before they go in. Frogs' legs were a familiar American hotel and restaurant item around 1900, appearing on high-end menus of the period alongside terrapin and canvasback duck, so a chef writing for that world would treat them as no more exotic than sweetbreads. The book's "World's Kitchen" framing is doing its usual work here — presenting a regional American dish as one more foreign cuisine for a cosmopolitan household to try.