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Chicken Gumbo Soup

A hearty soup made with chicken, ham, okra, tomatoes, cayenne pepper, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Okra and tomato work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 327 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Chicken Gumbo Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Cut the ham into small dice.

  2. Place the diced ham in a large kettle and cover with water.

  3. Cook for 45 minutes.

Combine and can

  1. Add the chicken meat, canned okra, canned tomatoes, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Place the soup in cans, cap them, tip them, and process.

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. Okra + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together327 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Chicken + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,031 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Okra + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together727 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Chicken + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken meat
Provides the main protein and substance of the soup.
Lean ham
Adds savory, smoky flavor to the cooking water that becomes the soup base.
Canned okra
Releases natural thickeners that give the soup a fuller, slightly silky body.
Canned tomatoes
Add acidity and body, rounding out the flavor of the soup.

The step that matters

Processing the sealed cans. The soup is a low-acid mixture of meat and vegetables. Proper heat processing is needed to destroy harmful microorganisms such as Clostridium botulinum, so the cans must be processed fully and correctly for the soup to be safe to store.

Swap the okra

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, meat, ham, tomato, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Okrathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, meat, ham, tomato, pepper. 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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