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New Orleans Gumbo

A chicken gumbo with oysters, sassafras leaves, and rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,769 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

New Orleans Gumbo

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Coat the chicken pieces in flour.

  2. In a pan, heat the butter and fry the chicken until golden brown.

Make the soup

  1. Transfer the chicken to a soup pot and add the hot water.

  2. Simmer slowly for 2 hours.

  3. Mix flour and butter together to create a thickening paste.

  4. Stir in red pepper and salt.

  5. Strain the oysters and add the juice to the soup.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, stir in the sassafras leaves and simmer for 5 minutes.

  2. Serve the soup hot with boiled 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. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  2. Pepper + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + oystertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main meat and savory flavor of the soup as it simmers.
Flour
Coats the chicken for browning and, mixed with butter, thickens the soup.
Butter
Adds fat for frying the chicken and richness to the flour thickening paste.
Oysters
Their strained juice adds a briny, savory flavor to the soup.
Sassafras leaves
Adds an earthy, aromatic flavor and helps give the soup body.

The step that matters

Adding the sassafras leaves. Powdered sassafras leaves turn stringy and ropy if boiled, so they are stirred in just before serving and kept at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil.

“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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