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Simple Gumbo Filet

A gumbo made with fowl, flour, lard, pepper, salt, water, and sassafras powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,459 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Simple Gumbo Filet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and fry

  1. Cut the fowl into small pieces and dredge them with flour.

  2. Fry the pieces in lard until browned.

Simmer and thicken

  1. Add pepper, salt, and water; cover and boil until the soup is well flavored.

  2. Thicken the soup with sassafras powder and let it boil once before serving.

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. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the meat that gives the soup its main body and flavor.
Flour
Coats the pieces so they brown and help thicken the soup.
Lard
Fat for frying that browns the floured pieces and adds richness.
Sassafras powder
Thickens the soup and adds its distinctive aroma.

The step that matters

Thickening with sassafras powder. Sassafras powder can turn stringy or ropy if it boils vigorously or for too long, so it is added after the soup is well flavored and only brought to a single boil.

“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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