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Gumbo Soup

A hearty stew of veal, chicken, vegetables, oysters, and gumbo served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Gumbo Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Combine veal, fowl, carrots, turnips, whole onion, and water in a soup pot.

  2. Boil for 5 hours.

  3. Remove the chicken, cut it into small pieces, and set aside.

Brown and thicken

  1. Slice the two onions and fry them in butter until brown.

  2. Remove the onions and add the chicken pieces to the pan, frying until brown.

  3. Return the fried onions to the pan.

  4. Sprinkle in some flour while stirring continuously to avoid burning.

  5. Add the flour mixture to the chicken and strain the soup into it.

  6. Boil for an additional 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Wash the oysters and strain their liquor into the soup.

  2. Add the oysters and let it boil briefly.

  3. Mix the gumbo with the cold water and stir it into the soup while it is boiling.

  4. Do not let it boil after adding the gumbo.

  5. Serve the soup with a side of boiled rice, adding a spoonful to each bowl.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Carrot + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal shin
Gives the broth body and rich meaty flavor during the long simmer.
Old fowl
Adds deep poultry flavor and gelatin to the broth as it simmers.
Butter
Fat for frying the onions and chicken, building browned flavor.
Flour
Thickens the soup and adds body once cooked with the browned chicken.
Oysters
Add a briny, savory flavor to the finished soup.
Gumbo
Thickens and flavors the soup when mixed with cold water and stirred in.

The step that matters

Do not let it boil after adding the gumbo. Once the gumbo mixture goes in, boiling can make the thickened soup separate or turn stringy and lumpy, so it should only be kept hot.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, carrot, turnip, butter, flour, oyster, rice):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, carrot, turnip, butter, flour, oyster, 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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