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Chicken Gumbo Soup

A hearty soup made with chicken, vegetables, okra, and herbs simmered in broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and okra share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chicken Gumbo Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Fry the ham strips in butter until browned.

  2. Add the minced carrot, turnip, and onion to the pan and cook until browned.

  3. Add the chicken pieces and cook until browned.

  4. Pour in 2 quarts of water and bring to a boil.

  5. Tie thyme, parsley, bay leaf, and cloves in a piece of cheesecloth and add to the soup.

Simmer and season

  1. Boil until the chicken is tender, then add the okra.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

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. Turnip + okratop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together53 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 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. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main protein and savory flavor that the broth is built on.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aroma as it browns in the fat.
Okra
Releases natural thickening starch into the broth as it cooks.
Ham
Browns in butter to add smoky, savory depth to the base.
Tomato
Adds acidity and body, rounding out the broth's flavor.

The step that matters

Brown the ham, vegetables and chicken before adding water. Browning creates Maillard reaction flavors in the fat and sugars on the surface of the ingredients. Those browned bits build the deep color and savory taste that plain boiled chicken would lack.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, carrot, turnip, onion, tomato, ham, okra):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, carrot, turnip, onion, tomato, ham, okra. 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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