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Old Louisiana Chicken Gumbo

A hearty soup made with ham, chicken, onions, butter, flour, and okra or gumbo file, simmered in chicken stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and okra match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 715 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Old Louisiana Chicken Gumbo

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Cook the ham in the chicken soup stock for about 1 hour.

  2. Make a thin paste with the flour.

  3. Add the flour paste, salt, pepper, butter, chicken, and onions to the soup stock.

  4. Bring the soup to a boil.

Finish and process

  1. Add the Gumbo file or okra mixture to the soup.

  2. Exhaust for 3 minutes and process for 40 minutes at 245°F (118°C).

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. Onion + okratop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together715 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + okratop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together234 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  4. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat flour
Thickens the soup when mixed into a paste and added to the stock.
Louisiana gumbo file or powdered okra
Thickens the soup and gives gumbo its characteristic texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the soup.
Minced chicken
Contributes meat and body to the soup.
Ham, cubed
Adds savory, smoky meat flavor to the stock.
Onions
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth to the soup.

The step that matters

Making the flour paste. Flour lumps when added directly to hot liquid because its starch granules hydrate unevenly. Mixing it into a thin paste first lets it disperse smoothly, so the soup thickens evenly without lumps.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, ham, onion, butter, wheat, flour, okra):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, ham, onion, butter, wheat, flour, okra. 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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