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New Orleans Gumbo Soup

A hearty soup featuring ham, veal, okra, crab, tomatoes, and a roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

New Orleans Gumbo Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Fry sliced onion in sweet drippings or butter until brown.

  2. Add chopped ham and veal (or turkey/chicken) to the pot and continue frying.

  3. Wash and slice the okra, discarding the stems.

  4. Add okra, boiling water, chili pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

  5. Simmer the mixture for two hours.

Add crab and finish

  1. Fry the picked crab meat in hot fat with sliced onion until brown.

  2. Add fried crab meat and sliced tomatoes to the soup after two hours.

  3. Mix butter and flour together, then add to the soup and bring to a boil.

  4. Strain the soup if desired, allowing small particles of crab and slices of okra to remain.

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. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Okra + crabtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together33 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  5. Okra + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Okra
Releases natural thickeners as it simmers, giving the gumbo body and a silky texture.
Butter and flour
Flour cooked into butter forms a roux that thickens the soup and adds a toasted flavour.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and sweetness that balance the rich fried fats and meats.
Hard-shell crabs
Provide the main seafood flavour and sweet meat that defines the gumbo.
Ham
Adds smoky, savoury depth from browned meat fat and drippings.

The step that matters

Fry the onion until brown. Deep browning builds the dark colour and roasted, savoury flavour the gumbo depends on. Pale onion gives a flat, sweet-tasting base that cannot be recovered later in the simmer.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, ham, veal, okra, pepper, crab):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, ham, veal, okra, pepper, crab. 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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