Ochra Gumbo

History

"Ochra Gumbo" is recipe No. 44 in "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking" (San Francisco, 1881). Fisher's directions are spare: "Get a beef shank, have it cracked and put to boil in one gallon of water. Boil to half a gallon, then strain and put back on fire. Cut ochra in small pieces and put in soup; don't put in any ends of ochra. Season with salt and pepper while cooking. Stir it occasionally and keep it from burning. To be sent to table with dry boiled rice."

Gumbo was not incidental to Abby Fisher's repertoire. She names it in the opening line of her own preface — offering "a book of my knowledge — based on an experience of upwards of thirty-five years — in the art of cooking Soups, Gumbos, Terrapin Stews, Meat Stews" — and gives three of them: Oyster Gumbo, this Ochra Gumbo, and Chicken Gumbo. She could neither read nor write and dictated the book, signing it "Late of Mobile, Ala." Her cooking had public standing: a diploma at the Sacramento State Fair in 1879 and two medals at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair in 1880. Her 1881 book is the second known cookbook by a Black woman in the United States, after Malinda Russell's "Domestic Cook Book" (1866).

Fisher was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in June 1831 to Abbie Clifton; genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation.

Okra itself is an African plant — thought to have originated in the region around Ethiopia — that reached the Southern United States through the transatlantic slave trade, where its viscous texture was used to thicken the soups and stews that developed into gumbo. The dish's name followed the same route: "gumbo" derives from a Bantu word for okra, rendered ki ngombo or quingombo in Kimbundu, and gombo in the Bambara language of West Africa. That background is documented for the vegetable and for the name. For Fisher's particular beef-shank-and-okra version, the record documents no specific earlier origin — it stands as hers, set down under her own name.

Ingredients

• 1 whole beef shank
• 1 gallon water
• ochra (okra)
• salt
• pepper

Instructions

1. Crack a beef shank and put it to boil in one gallon of water.
2. Boil until reduced to half a gallon.
3. Strain the broth and put it back on the fire.
4. Cut okra into small pieces, discarding the ends.
5. Add the okra to the soup.
6. Season with salt and pepper while cooking.
7. Stir occasionally and keep from burning.
8. Serve with dry boiled rice.