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Gumbo Soup

A hearty soup made with chicken, okra, tomatoes, onions, ham, and spices, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Prepare

  1. Fry the chicken in a pot until light brown, then remove excess lard from the pot.

Make the gumbo

  1. Add water, okra, tomatoes, onions, and ham to the pot.

  2. Season with salt and cayenne pepper.

  3. Boil for three hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled rice, placing a tablespoon of rice in the center of each soup plate.

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 + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  5. Chicken + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,031 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Okra
Releases starchy mucilage as it cooks, thickening the broth.
Chicken
Browned in lard to build savory flavor, then simmered to tender meat in the broth.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body, rounding out the flavor of the broth.
Onions
Provide sweetness and aromatic depth as they soften in the broth.
Ham
Adds smoky, salty savory flavor to the broth.

The step that matters

Boil for three hours. A long, steady simmer lets the okra break down and thicken the broth while the chicken becomes tender and the flavors meld. Too short a cook leaves the okra stringy and the broth thin.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, okra, tomato, ham, 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.

More gumbo recipes

Chicken 45Soup 37Okra 30Oyster 21Crab 8French 8 See all 76 →

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