Skip to main content
Main

Gumbo Soup

A hearty stew of chicken, pork or ham, onions, okra, tomatoes, corn or oysters, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 and onions

  1. Fry the fowl joints in dripping or butter for five minutes, then remove the meat.

  2. In the same fat, cook the sliced onions until soft.

  3. In a soup kettle, combine the chicken, salt pork or ham, and fried onions.

Simmer the gumbo

  1. Add 2 quarts of cold water and bring to a boil, then let it simmer for 2 hours.

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

Finish and serve

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

  2. 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 rich flavor that the broth is built on.
Okra pods
Releases natural thickening that gives the gumbo body as it simmers.
Butter rolled in flour
Thickens the broth at the end, giving it a smoother, heavier texture.
Onions
Softened in fat to build a sweet, savory base for the broth.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body, rounding out the flavor of the broth.

The step that matters

Adding the butter rolled in flour. Flour clumps if dropped in unmixed, so stir it in thoroughly and boil a few minutes to cook out its raw taste and fully thicken 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 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipes