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Gumbo or Okra Soup

A tomato and okra soup flavored with bacon or ham, onion, parsley, and broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Gumbo or Okra Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Render the fat from the bacon or ham in a pot and drain it off.

  2. Fry the sliced onion in the rendered fat until brown.

  3. Scald, peel, and chop the tomatoes, and slice the okra.

Simmer and serve

  1. Add the tomatoes, okra, and chopped parsley to the pot.

  2. Pour in the hot broth and cook slowly for 3 hours.

  3. Season with salt and pepper to taste and serve hot.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Okra + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together206 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tomato + okratop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together327 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Onion + okratop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together715 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 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

Okra
Releases natural thickening starch as it cooks, giving the soup body.
Tomatoes
Provide acidity and liquid that build the soup's base flavor during slow cooking.
Onion
Browning in the rendered fat builds sweetness and savory depth.
Bacon or ham fat
Carries smoky, savory flavor and fat into the pot for frying the onion.
Broth
Supplies the main cooking liquid and savory flavor for the soup.

The step that matters

Fry the onion until brown. Browning the onion in the rendered fat develops sweet, roasted flavors through the Maillard reaction. Pale onion gives a flatter soup that the long simmer cannot fully correct.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, tomato, okra, parsley, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Eggplantfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, tomato, okra, parsley, pepper. 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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