Skip to main content
Main

Gumbo Soup

A soup made with okra, meat, pulverized sassafras leaves, oysters, and served with rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Okra and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 250 recipes. Both carry 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol, which smells clove, smoky. The science ↓

Gumbo Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Make okra soup.

  2. Boil the meat until tender, then shred it.

  3. Strain the soup and thicken it with 2 teaspoons of pulverized sassafras leaves.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the oysters and remove from heat.

  2. Stir in the sassafras powder until the soup thickens slightly.

  3. Serve with 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 + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together250 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  2. Meat + ricetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Meat + oystertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Okra + oystertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together71 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Oyster + ricetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Okra
Releases mucilage that thickens the soup and gives it a silky body.
Meat
Cooked until tender and shredded, it adds savory flavor and substance to the soup.
Oysters
Add briny, savory flavor and a tender texture when stirred in at the end.
Rice
Serves as a starchy base that soaks up the soup.
Sassafras leaves (pulverized)
Ground into powder, it thickens the soup and adds its own earthy flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring in the sassafras powder. Filé powder is best added off the heat and not boiled. Prolonged boiling makes it stringy and ropy and can cause it to clump, so the soup should be thickened gently once the pot is removed from the heat.

Swap the okra

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, oyster, rice):

  1. Cucumberfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Okrathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, oyster, rice. 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

Rice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesMeat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipesSteamed RiceSteamed Rice48 recipesMeatballsMeatballs37 recipes