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Potage Gumbo, Glasgow
Cut into small dice one pound raw lean mutton, one medium carrot, one white turnip, one white onion, one leek and one sound, peeled, green pepper, place in a saucepan with an ounce butter and brown ten minutes, occasionally tossing meanwhile. Moisten with three and a half quarts water, add one pound mutton bones, three ounces well-washed barley, two tablespoons Worcestershire sauce, two teaspoons salt and a half teaspoon pepper, lightly mix and slowly boil one hour. Then add twelve trimmed fresh okras cut in half-inch pieces, and two peeled, sound red tomatoes cut in eight pieces each. Boil forty-five minutes longer, but rather slowly. Take up bones, skim fat from surface, pour the soup into a tureen and serve.
A Scotch broth wearing gumbo's clothes: barley and mutton on one side, okra and tomato on the other. It is straightforward, but a few of Filippini's assumptions need translating.
- MuttonTrue mutton — sheep over two years — is scarce outside halal and specialist butchers. Lamb shoulder or neck, cut into 1/2-inch dice, is the practical substitute; it will taste milder and cook a little faster. Ask for a pound of bones to go with it, or use lamb neck bones.
- "Slowly boil"This means a bare simmer, surface barely trembling. A real rolling boil for nearly two hours will cloud the broth, break the barley down to paste and emulsify the mutton fat back into the soup instead of leaving it on top to be skimmed.
- Barley quantityThree ounces is a scant half cup of pearl barley. It roughly triples in volume, so the soup thickens noticeably in the second hour; keep a kettle of hot water nearby and top up if it tightens past soup consistency.
- Okra and the ropiness questionOkra cut into half-inch pieces and simmered 45 minutes will release its mucilage into the broth — which is the point here, as it is the only thickener besides barley. If you want less of it, add the okra in the last 20 minutes instead.
- The green pepper"Green pepper" in a 1906 American book means a sweet bell pepper, not a chili. "Sound" throughout simply means unblemished, unspoiled.
- WorcestershireTwo tablespoons is assertive by modern taste and, with two teaspoons of salt, brings plenty of sodium. Start with one tablespoon, and hold back some salt until the end — mutton bones give up their own savor over two hours.
- SkimmingLamb and mutton fat congeals hard and tastes waxy when cool, so the skimming step is not optional. Easiest route is to chill the finished pot and lift the cap off, then reheat.
- YieldThree and a half quarts of water reduces to roughly three quarts of finished soup: eight to ten first-course servings, or six as a main with bread.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its organizing conceit was to attach a place-name to nearly every one of its thousands of recipes — a tour of the world's kitchens as a fashionable American restaurant imagined it. "Potage Gumbo, Glasgow" is that conceit at its most transparent: the mutton, barley, root vegetables and leek are the standing components of Scotch broth, while the okra and tomato are borrowed from the Creole gumbo Filippini also treats elsewhere in the book. The word gumbo is generally traced to a West African term for okra — ki ngombo in Bantu languages is the usual citation — and in nineteenth-century American usage it named the pod as often as the soup, so a dish thickened with okra could reasonably be called a gumbo whatever else was in the pot. Whether any cook in Glasgow ever made this is another matter; the name is a menu flourish, of the kind that let a hotel kitchen print a different soup every day of the year.