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Oyster Gumbo

A hearty soup of chicken, ham, oysters, and herbs simmered in a seasoned broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Summer savory and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 241 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Oyster Gumbo

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Divide the chicken, skin it, and flour each piece well.

  2. In a pot, fry the diced ham in butter until brown.

Simmer the soup

  1. Pour in 2 quarts of boiling water and add the tied bunches of summer savory and parsley, along with salt and cayenne pepper.

  2. Let this boil slowly for 4 hours.

  3. Remove the summer savory and parsley, pull the chicken into pieces, and return it to the pot.

  4. About 15 minutes before serving, heat the oysters and their liquor, then add them to the soup.

  5. Take out 1 cup of the soup and mix it with the file powder until smooth, then return it to the pot.

  6. Let it boil once, then pour into a heated tureen and serve with boiled rice on the side.

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. Summer savory + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together241 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Summer savory + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together671 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

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

  5. Oyster + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together360 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the meat and flavour base that the soup is built around.
Oysters
Add their briny flavour and liquor to the soup near the end of cooking.
Boiled ham
Browned in butter first, adding savoury, caramelised flavour to the base.
Filee powder
Thickens the soup when stirred into a portion of liquid and returned to the pot.

The step that matters

Adding the filee powder. Filee powder thickens soup only when it is stirred into a little liquid until smooth first and then returned to the pot. Added directly it clumps, and boiling it too long can make the soup stringy.

Swap the summer savory

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, oyster, ham, parsley, pepper, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Summer savorythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, oyster, ham, parsley, pepper, butter. 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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