Skip to main content
Main

Baked Gumbo

A baked vegetable gumbo with tomatoes, okra, green pepper, onion, seasoned with black pepper, sea salt, butter, and topped with bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tomato and okra 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 ↓

Baked Gumbo

Ingredients

Directions

Layer the vegetables

  1. Layer sliced tomatoes and okra in a baking dish.

  2. Add slices of green pepper and onion.

  3. Season with black pepper, coarse sea salt, and butter.

Bake and brown

  1. Bake until vegetables are done.

  2. Sprinkle with bread crumbs and return to the oven until brown.

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. Tomato + okratop 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

Sliced tomatoes
Adds moisture and acidity that form the juices the vegetables cook in.
Okra
Releases a natural thickener that helps the juices turn slightly silky and loose-bodied.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavor and helps the crumb topping take on golden browning.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned topping as their starches and surface dry out and brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Browning the bread crumbs. Crumbs sprinkled on at the end brown quickly, so they can scorch before the vegetables are ready or stay pale if the oven is not hot enough. Watch them closely on the final return to the oven, since browning relies on dry heat acting on the crumbs and the butter.

Swap the okra

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, onion, butter, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Okrathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, onion, butter, bread. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes