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Gumbo Soup

A hearty stew of veal, fowl, 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 stock

  1. Combine veal, fowl, carrots, turnips, onion, and water in a soup pot. Boil for 5 hours.

  2. Remove the fowl, cut into small pieces, and set aside.

Make the roux and finish the soup

  1. Fry sliced onions in butter in a pan until brown, then remove the onions.

  2. Add the fowl pieces to the pan and fry until brown.

  3. Add a little flour to the hot butter in the pan, stirring constantly to avoid burning.

  4. Combine the fried onions and fowl with the soup, strain into the mixture, and boil for 30 minutes.

  5. Wash oysters, strain their liquor into the soup, add oysters, and bring to a boil.

  6. Mix gumbo with cold water, stir into the soup while boiling, but do not let it boil after adding gumbo.

Serve

  1. Serve the soup with boiled rice, adding a spoonful to each 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. 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

Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks in the hot butter, giving the gumbo body.
Butter
Carries the browning of the onions and fowl and adds richness to the base.
Oysters
Add briny flavour and a soft, tender texture to the finished soup.
Fowl
Frying until brown deepens the savoury flavour of the broth.

The step that matters

Stirring in the gumbo. Once the gumbo is added, the soup must not boil again, because prolonged high heat can break down its thickening and make the texture stringy or grainy.

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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