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Gumbo Soup

A hearty chicken gumbo with okra, tomatoes, corn, and a roux of butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Okra and tomato work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 327 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Gumbo Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the chicken

  1. Fry the fowl in dripping or butter for five minutes.

  2. Remove the meat and place it in a soup kettle.

  3. Cook the sliced onions in the remaining fat from the frying pan.

  4. Add the cooked onions and salt pork or ham to the kettle with the chicken.

Simmer the gumbo

  1. Pour in the cold water and bring to a boil, then let it simmer for two hours.

  2. Add the okra, chopped green pepper, and tomatoes, and simmer until the chicken is tender.

  3. Remove larger bones, season with salt, and five minutes before serving, add the corn pulp or oysters.

  4. Stir in the butter rolled in flour, boil for a few minutes, and serve.

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. Okra + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together327 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Onion + okratop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together715 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tomato + corntop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Okra + corntop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together161 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Okra + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together234 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the main meat and flavor that the broth is built on.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, adding depth to the broth.
Salt pork or corned ham
Renders fat and savory flavor into the broth as it simmers.
Okra
Releases natural thickening starch that gives the gumbo body.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and liquid that balance the richness of the broth.
Butter rolled in flour
Acts as a roux-style thickener that smooths and thickens the broth at the end.

The step that matters

Adding the butter rolled in flour. Flour added to hot liquid clumps unless it is first blended with fat, which is why it is rolled in butter. Stirring it in and boiling for a few minutes cooks out the raw flour taste and fully thickens the broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pork, okra, pepper, tomato, corn, flour):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pork, okra, pepper, tomato, corn, flour. 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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