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Gumbo or Okra Soup

A tomato and okra soup flavored with bacon or ham, onions, parsley, and hot broth.

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 or Okra Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fry the bacon or ham until the fat is rendered, then drain it off.

  2. In the same fat, fry the sliced onion until brown.

  3. Scald, peel, and cut the tomatoes, then slice the okra.

Simmer and serve

  1. In a stew pot, combine the tomatoes, okra, and chopped parsley with the hot broth.

  2. Cook slowly for three hours, then season with salt and pepper.

  3. Serve hot.

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
Provide acidity, body and most of the liquid flavour in the soup.
Okra
Releases mucilage during slow cooking, thickening the broth and giving it a silky texture.
Onion
Browned in the rendered fat, it adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the base.
Bacon or fat ham
Its rendered fat carries flavour into the onion and gives the soup a smoky, savoury richness.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for three hours. A gentle, long simmer lets the okra break down and release its natural thickening, while the tomatoes and broth meld. Boiling hard can scorch the bottom of the pot and make the texture ragged.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, 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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