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Gumbo Soup

A soup made with bacon, onion, tomatoes, okra, parsley, broth, salt, and pepper, simmered for 3 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Gumbo Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Render the fat from the bacon in a stew kettle, then drain off the fat.

  2. Fry the sliced onion until brown.

  3. Peel and chop the tomatoes.

  4. Cut the okra.

Simmer

  1. Add the tomatoes, okra, and parsley to the kettle.

  2. Pour in the hot broth.

  3. Let it cook slowly for 3 hours.

  4. Season with salt and pepper before serving.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Okra + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together206 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. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Add liquid and acidity, breaking down during long cooking to give the soup body and flavour.
Okra
Releases natural mucilage during slow cooking, helping to thicken the soup.
Onion
Browns in the fat to build sweetness and savoury depth as the base flavour.
Bacon
Its rendered fat carries flavour into the pot before the onion is browned.

The step that matters

Letting it cook slowly. A gentle, long simmer lets the tomatoes and okra break down and meld into a thickened, cohesive soup. Boiling hard can make the okra and tomatoes fall apart unevenly and the flavours less balanced.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, okra, parsley, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Eggplantfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, okra, parsley, pepper. 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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