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Chicken Gumbo

A stew of chicken, okra, tomatoes, corn, and onions cooked in fat with flour and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Chicken Gumbo

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Heat the fat in a fryer.

  2. Wash and cut the okra into pieces, then fry in the fat until light brown.

  3. Add the chopped onion and let it brown.

  4. Stir in the flour and cook until browned.

  5. Add the chopped tomatoes and grated corn, and let boil for a few minutes.

  6. Combine this mixture with previously strained soup stock.

Add the chicken and serve

  1. In a separate pan, fry the chicken pieces in boiling fat until cooked.

  2. Add the fried chicken to the soup mixture and season with cayenne and salt.

  3. Serve thick, with or without 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. Okra + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together327 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Okra + oniontop 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

Okra
Its natural thickening gums give the gumbo a body that becomes thick as it cooks.
Flour
Browned in the fat, it thickens the soup and adds a toasty, nutty flavor.
Onion
Browning it in the fat builds sweetness and savory depth in the base.
Tomatoes
Their acidity and liquid add brightness and moisture to the soup.
Chicken
Frying the pieces adds browned flavor and it becomes the main protein of the dish.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Cooking the flour in fat until browned develops a nutty flavor and thickens the base; stopping too early leaves a raw, pasty taste, while going too far can scorch it and make the gumbo bitter.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against okra, flour, tomato, corn, chicken, 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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