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Gumbo Soup

A hearty stew of veal, fowl, vegetables, and oysters flavored with gumbo.

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. In a soup pot, combine the veal, fowl, carrots, turnips, whole onion, and water. Boil for 5 hours.

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

Make the base

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

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

  3. In the same pan, add a little flour to the hot butter, stirring constantly to avoid burning.

  4. Combine the fried onions and the flour mixture with the chicken.

  5. Strain the soup into the chicken mixture and boil for 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Wash the oysters and strain their liquor into the soup. Add the oysters and bring to a boil.

  2. Mix the gumbo with the cold water and stir it into the soup while it is boiling. Do not let it boil after adding the gumbo.

  3. Serve the soup with a side of boiled rice.

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 butter and soup, giving the gumbo a fuller body.
Oysters
Add briny flavor and a soft, tender texture to the finished soup.
Gumbo
Thickens and flavors the soup when stirred in as a cold mixture.

The step that matters

Stirring the gumbo in while the soup is boiling. Gumbo mixed with cold water thickens the soup as it heats. Letting the soup boil after it is added can cause it to break, turn grainy, or thicken unevenly, so keep it just below a boil.

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.

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