Skip to main content
Main

Gumbo Soup

A hearty soup made with veal, chicken, vegetables, oysters, and gumbo seasoning, served with boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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.

  2. Boil for 5 hours.

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

Make the roux and finish the soup

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

  2. In the same pan, add chicken pieces and fry until brown.

  3. Add fried onions back to the pan.

  4. Sprinkle in some flour and stir continuously to avoid burning.

  5. Combine the chicken and onion mixture with the strained soup.

  6. Boil for 30 minutes.

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

  8. Add oysters and bring to a boil.

  9. Mix gumbo with cold water.

  10. Stir mixture into the soup while it is boiling.

  11. Do not let the soup boil after adding the gumbo.

Serve

  1. Serve the soup with boiled rice, adding a spoonful of rice 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 long-simmered stock its body and rich meaty flavour.
Old fowl
Adds deep poultry flavour to the stock during the long simmer.
Flour
Thickens the soup by swelling with the fat and liquid when cooked.
Oysters
Contribute briny, savoury flavour and their liquor seasons the soup.
Gumbo
Thickens the soup and adds its own distinct flavour as a finishing ingredient.

The step that matters

Do not let the soup boil after adding the gumbo. Boiling after the gumbo is stirred in can cause it to clump and thicken unevenly, so the soup should be kept just below a boil once it is added.

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 →

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesSteamed RiceSteamed Rice48 recipes