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Tomato Gumbo Soup

A tomato soup with okra, onions, peppers, and flour thickener.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and okra 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 ↓

Tomato Gumbo Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Set the soup stock on the fire an hour before dinner.

  2. Chop the tomatoes into small pieces.

Cook

  1. Add the tomatoes, minced vegetables, and okra to the stock and let it boil gently.

  2. Mix flour with water to create a thickening and add it to the soup.

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

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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 mucilage that gives the gumbo body and a silky, slightly thick texture.
Flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Canned tomatoes
Add acidity and tomato flavor, with their juices adding moisture to the broth.
Soup stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavor of the whole dish.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and water thickening. Flour must be mixed smoothly with water before it goes into the hot soup; added dry or in lumps, it clumps and does not thicken evenly, because starch needs to be dispersed in liquid to swell uniformly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, clove, okra, pepper, flour. 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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