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Gumbo Soup

A hearty soup of chicken, okra, tomatoes, corn, onion, and ham served with boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Okra and tomato work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 327 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Gumbo Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Combine 5 quarts of water and 5 pounds of chicken or a mix of chicken and veal in a large pot.

  2. Add 1 quart of okra, 1 quart of tomatoes, ½ cup of corn, and 1 chopped onion.

  3. Season with red pepper, coarse sea salt, and black pepper to taste.

Brown the meat

  1. Fry the slice of ham in a separate pan until browned.

  2. Remove the ham and add the disjointed chicken, rolled in flour, to the pan.

  3. Fry the chicken until light brown.

  4. Transfer the chicken to the pot with the soup ingredients.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook until the meat easily falls apart.

  2. Serve with a spoonful of boiled rice in the center of each soup plate.

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. Okra + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together327 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Okra + oniontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together715 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Corn + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Okra + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together250 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the meat and rich flavor that gives the gumbo its body.
Okra
Releases natural thickeners as it cooks, giving the soup a silky body.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and liquid that balance the richness of the meat.
Flour (in the method)
Coats the chicken so it browns in the pan and helps thicken the soup.
Ham
Browned first to add smoky, savory flavor to the frying fat.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aroma to the soup base.

The step that matters

Browning the floured chicken. Frying the flour-coated chicken until light brown builds color and toasty flavor from browning reactions. Stopping too early leaves the soup pale and flat.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, okra, tomato, corn, ham, pepper, rice. 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.

More gumbo recipes

Chicken 45Soup 37Okra 30Oyster 21Crab 8French 8 See all 76 →

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