Skip to main content
Main

Gumbo Aux Herbes

A gumbo made with various greens, veal brisket, ham, onion, lard, and hot water, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 320 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Gumbo Aux Herbes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the greens

  1. Soak and wash the greens thoroughly, then trim off the coarse midrib of each leaf.

  2. Boil the greens for at least two hours, adding 1 teaspoon of cooking soda to the water.

  3. Strain the greens and chop them as you would spinach.

Make the gumbo

  1. In a pan, fry the veal brisket, ham, and chopped onion in 1 heaping tablespoon of lard until rich brown.

  2. Add the chopped greens to the pan, stirring with a wooden spoon.

  3. Pour in enough hot water to create a sufficient gumbo for your family.

Serve

  1. Serve the gumbo with boiled rice.

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. Turnip + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together320 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cabbage + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal brisket
Browned in lard to build rich, savoury meat flavour for the gumbo.
Ham
Browned with the meat and onion to add salty, smoky depth to the base.
Cooking soda
Added to the boiling water to soften the greens and help them turn tender.
Lard
Fat used to fry the meat and onion, carrying flavour and promoting browning.
Large onion
Softens and browns in the fat, adding sweetness and aroma to the base.
Mixed greens
Form the body of the gumbo, giving bulk, colour and earthy flavour.

The step that matters

Frying the meat, ham and onion until rich brown. Browning through the lard creates deep, roasted flavours through the Maillard reaction. Pale frying leaves the gumbo flat-tasting, so the pieces should be deeply coloured before the greens go in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, turnip, mustard, spinach, parsley, veal, ham):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, turnip, mustard, spinach, parsley, veal, ham. 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.

You might also like

Rice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesRed CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipesStewed CabbageStewed Cabbage58 recipesBaked CabbageBaked Cabbage51 recipes