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Okra Soup

A hearty soup of sliced okra, round steak, onions, and butter, thickened with flour and milk.

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 ↓

Okra Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Fry the chopped round steak with 2 tablespoons of butter and the onion in a skillet until browned.

  2. Combine the sliced okra and boiling salted water in a soup kettle and cook until tender.

  3. Add the browned steak and onions to the okra and simmer for 2 hours.

Thicken and serve

  1. Rub together 1 tablespoon of butter and 2 tablespoons of flour in a bowl.

  2. Stir in the hot milk until smooth, then pour the mixture into the soup kettle.

  3. Season with white pepper, bring to a boil, and serve immediately.

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. Okra + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together234 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Round steak
Provides savory meat flavor and chewy body after browning and long simmering.
Okra
Releases natural starch and mucilage that gives the soup body and a silky texture.
All-purpose flour
Combined with butter to form a roux that thickens the milk and soup.
Hot milk
Adds creaminess and mild sweetness, softening the soup's richness.
Onion
Browns in the fat to add sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth.

The step that matters

Thicken with the butter and flour mixture. Stirring the flour and butter into hot milk until smooth prevents lumps; flour needs to be fully dispersed to thicken evenly when added to the hot soup.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, okra, flour, milk. 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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