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Southern Chicken Gumbo
Flour and fry a chicken brown after the usual manner (though it need not be a young chicken). Fry two slices of breakfast bacon or salt pork, into the grease of which stir a tablespoonful of sifted flour; have a quart of okra and two small onions cut fine; fry this in the bacon grease until the okra begins to "rope" (do not let scorch). Then turn all-chicken, gravy, okra, onion, and bacon-into porcelain lined souppot, add two quarts of hot water, cook slowly two hours; stir well from the bottom occasionally. A green pepper added gives a nice flavor. Serve with dry boiled rice. It is a dinner in itself. Okra is strictly a southern vegetable, but bears transportation and may be found in northern vegetable markets.
A straightforward okra gumbo, thickened by the okra itself rather than by roux or filé. The original assumes you know how to cut up and fry a chicken, and gives no salt measurement at all.
- "Until the okra begins to rope"This is the hinge of the dish. Okra releases a mucilage that strings from the spoon when heated in fat; frying it past that point cooks off the raw grassiness and leaves body without sliminess. Expect 10-15 minutes over medium heat, stirring, and stop short of any browning — scorched okra will bitter the whole pot.
- A quart of okraMeasured cut, not whole: roughly 1 lb of fresh pods, trimmed and sliced into rounds. Frozen cut okra works, but thaw and drain it first or it will steam rather than fry and never rope properly.
- The chicken"Need not be a young chicken" allows an older, tougher bird, which likely explains the two-hour simmer. A supermarket bird at 3½-4 lb, cut into eight pieces, will be tender in about an hour; give it the full two only if the meat is still tough. Flour and brown the pieces, don't cook them through at that stage.
- Breakfast baconOrdinary sliced smoked bacon. Salt pork, the alternative the recipe itself offers, gives a cleaner pork flavour with no smoke; either is correct here.
- Porcelain lined souppotEnamelled cast iron or any non-reactive heavy pot. The instruction dates from an era of bare iron and tinned copper, which could discolour long-simmered vegetable stews; a modern stainless or enamelled pot needs no thought.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is listed; the bacon or salt pork would have carried some of it. Salt the pot after the first half hour of simmering and again at the end, and be generous with black pepper. Cayenne is common in the region though not named here.
- The green pepperA bell pepper, seeded and chopped fine, added with the onion. Together with the onion it is two thirds of what later cookbooks call the trinity; celery is the missing third if you want it.
- Yield and servingServes six generously. "Dry boiled rice" means long-grain rice cooked so the grains stay separate — a mound in the bowl with the gumbo ladled around it, not stirred through.
Gumbo reaches American cookbooks through Louisiana, where West African, French, and Choctaw cooking met: the word itself is generally traced to a Bantu term for okra (ki ngombo or similar), and okra came to the Americas with enslaved Africans. This version is the okra-thickened branch of the family rather than the filé branch, with flour stirred into bacon fat and barely coloured. The closing note that okra "bears transportation and may be found in northern vegetable markets" is the most revealing line on the page: the recipe assumes readers well outside Louisiana, and reassures them that the key ingredient will reach them in usable condition.