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French Gumbo

A stew of fowl, oysters, onions, and spices simmered in butter, lard, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

French Gumbo

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Season the cut-up fowl with salt and pepper, then dredge it with flour.

  2. In a soup kettle, heat the butter and lard, then add the chopped onion.

  3. Fry the fowl until it is browned.

Simmer and finish

  1. Add the boiling water and cover the kettle; let it simmer for 2 to 3 hours.

  2. Add the oysters with their liquor, thyme, and parsley.

  3. Just before serving, stir in the filé powder and season with Cayenne pepper.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the meat and body of the broth as it simmers for hours.
Flour
Coats the fowl so it browns well and helps thicken the gumbo.
Oysters
Add briny, savory flavor and tender texture when added near the end.
Filé powder
Thickens the broth and adds an earthy, slightly rooty flavor.

The step that matters

Just before serving, stir in the filé powder. Filé powder thickens by forming a stringy texture when heated, and boiling it for long can make the gumbo ropy and stringy. Stirring it in off the heat near serving preserves a smooth body.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, flour, butter, oyster, thyme, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, butter, oyster, thyme, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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