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Okras Au Gratin
Clip off both ends from thirty-six very fresh, sound medium okras, plunge them in a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt, boil for thirty minutes and drain on sieve. Mix in saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter and two and a half tablespoons flour, pour in a gill milk and a half gill cream, mix on fire until it comes to a boil, then add okras. Season with a level teaspoon salt, saltspoon cayenne, lightly mix, then transfer to a baking dish. Sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over, place a few little bits of butter on top, set in moderate oven for twenty minutes, remove and serve in same dish.
A short, sound dish once the two archaic liquid measures are translated and the boiling time is brought back to earth.
- Cut the boiling timeThirty minutes in salted water reduces medium okra to a grey collapse. Eight to ten minutes gives pods that are tender but still hold their shape, which is what the gratin needs.
- Gill and half gillA gill is half a cup, so this is 1/2 cup milk plus 1/4 cup cream. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, and with cayenne that is a firm hand: start with an eighth.
- Moderate oven350F. Twenty minutes is enough to set the sauce and colour the cheese; if the top is still pale, finish under the broiler for a minute.
- The sauce is deliberately thickThe sauce is thick -- Two and a half tablespoons flour to three-quarters of a cup of liquid gives a paste rather than a pouring sauce. That suits a vegetable that releases moisture in the oven, but cook the roux a full minute before adding the milk or it will taste of raw flour.
- Drain hardThe hinge of the dish. Okra carries a great deal of water and mucilage; tip it onto a sieve and leave it several minutes, shaking once or twice, before it meets the sauce. Wet okra thins the béchamel and turns the gratin ropy.
- CheeseOne tablespoon of Parmesan over a whole baking dish is thin by current taste. Two to three tablespoons of freshly grated Parmesan browns properly without overwhelming the vegetable.
- Quantity and yieldThirty-six medium pods is roughly a pound and a quarter, serving four as a side dish. Trim only the stem end closely; cutting deeply into both ends opens the pod and releases more mucilage.
Okra came to American kitchens from West Africa by way of the Caribbean and the Gulf South, carried in the provisioning and plant knowledge of enslaved Africans, and the name itself is generally traced to Igbo ọ́kụ̀rụ̀. By the early twentieth century it also appears in the repertoire of hotel and restaurant kitchens outside the South, which is how it turns up here dressed in a French cream sauce and Parmesan rather than in gumbo. The treatment follows professional-kitchen logic: boil the vegetable separately, bind it in béchamel, glaze it under cheese and butter, and send it to the table in the same dish it baked in.