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Chicken Gumbo

A hearty stew of ham, chicken, onions, flour, stock, butter, salt, okra, and water.

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 ↓

Chicken Gumbo

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the ham cubes in water for 30 minutes.

  2. In a separate bowl, make a smooth paste with the flour.

Make the gumbo

  1. Add the minced chicken, chopped onions, and flour paste to the chicken-soup stock.

  2. Stir in the butter and coarse sea salt, then boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Mix the powdered okra with water, then add to the pot.

Jar and process

  1. Fill glass jars or tin cans while hot, partially seal them.

  2. Process in a hot-water bath for 90 minutes, or adjust time based on your canning method.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Chicken + okratop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together320 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

Flour and butter 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

Chicken
Provides the main meaty body and substance of the gumbo.
Flour
Thickens the stock as its starch swells with heat, giving body.
Okra
Its natural gums thicken the liquid and add a silky texture.
Ham
Releases savoury, salty flavour into the stock as it cooks.
Onions
Build aromatic sweetness as they soften in the stock.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and rounds out the richness.

The step that matters

Make a smooth flour paste. Dry flour clumps when it meets liquid because its starch grains form lumps. Mixing it into a smooth paste first lets each grain hydrate evenly, so the stock thickens without lumps.

Swap the okra

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Okrathe original

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