Home › The World's Kitchen › Okra Salad
Okra Salad
Clip off stems from a pint and a half of very fresh, sound, medium okras. Plunge in cold water, thoroughly wash and drain, then place in a saucepan with two quarts boiling water, a teaspoon salt and two tablespoons vinegar. Cover pan and boil thirty minutes. Remove, thoroughly drain on a sieve and let get cold. Place in a bowl, season with four tablespoons dressing, mix well and serve.
A plain boiled-and-dressed okra salad of the kind that appears throughout Filippini-era American compendiums under "the world's kitchen." Two things need attention: the cooking time and the meaning of "dressing."
- The hinge: leave the pods wholeClipping only the stem, not the cap, and never slicing the pods is what keeps the mucilage inside. Cut okra crosswise and the boiling water turns to slime and the salad with it.
- Thirty minutes is far too longWhole medium pods are tender in about 5 to 8 minutes of boiling. Half an hour leaves them collapsed and stringy, and the pods will burst and weep. Test with a knife tip at five minutes.
- A pint and a half of okraMeasured by volume, as produce often was. That is roughly 10 to 12 ounces of whole medium pods, about three-quarters of a pound -- enough for around four as a side salad.
- The vinegar in the waterTwo tablespoons of acid in the pot is deliberate; it firms the pods and helps cut the ropiness. It will not do the colour any favours, and a long boil dulls it further.
- "Dressing"An unqualified "dressing" in books of this period most often means a French dressing -- roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper -- though it can also stand for mayonnaise or a boiled dressing. Four tablespoons is enough to coat this quantity without pooling.
- Cool completely before dressingWarm okra keeps releasing moisture and will thin the dressing into a puddle. Drain in a sieve, spread out, and let it come fully to room temperature or colder.
- Choosing pods"Medium" means about 3 inches. Anything longer than 4 inches is likely woody at the stem end, and no amount of boiling will fix that.
Okra came to the Americas with the transatlantic slave trade from West Africa, where the plant has long been cultivated; the English name is generally traced to Igbo ọ́kụ̀rụ̀, while the parallel American term gumbo comes from Bantu words for the same pod. In the United States it stayed largely a Southern vegetable through the nineteenth century. The recipe's structure — boil, drain, chill, dress — is the standard treatment applied in this period to almost any vegetable served cold, from string beans to cauliflower; only the vinegar in the cooking water is specific to okra, and it may well be there to fight the mucilage.