Chicken Gumbo

History

This recipe is Abby Fisher's own, from What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking (San Francisco, 1881) — among the earliest cookbooks published by an African-American author. 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. After emancipation she settled in San Francisco, where she was listed as a pickle manufacturer and won a diploma at the 1879 Sacramento State Fair and two medals at the 1880 San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair. Because she could neither read nor write, she dictated the book — "the writing of the book at my dictation" — presenting it as "a book of my knowledge... based on an experience of upwards of thirty-five years... in the art of cooking Soups, Gumbos, Terrapin Stews," and more. Her chicken gumbo is therefore recorded here in her own words, from her own authority as a cook.

The dish is built on okra. Food historians trace okra to Africa — it is believed to have originated in present-day Ethiopia — and it reached the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade. The word "gumbo" itself derives from a West African word for okra. Beyond that documented okra-and-gumbo lineage and Fisher's own kitchen, the historical record does not document a specific earlier origin for this particular chicken-and-okra preparation. What survives is Fisher's version, set down under her name in 1881.

Ingredients

• 1 chicken
• 1.5 tablespoons lard or butter
• dry flour
• 0.5 gallon hot water
• 1.5 quarts green okra
• 0.5 onion
• salt and pepper
• chilli pepper

Instructions

1. Salt and pepper the chicken.
2. Separate the chicken at all the joints and break the bones.
3. Mix the chicken well in dry flour.
4. Heat one and a half tablespoonfuls of lard or butter until hot.
5. Put the chicken in to fry until brown, taking care not to burn it.
6. Chop half of an ordinary-sized onion fine and fry it with the chicken.
7. Transfer the fried chicken to a soup kettle with half a gallon of hot water.
8. Add one and a half quarts of green okra cut into thin pieces, throwing away the ends.
9. Add chopped chilli pepper if liked.
10. Let the whole boil down to three pints.
11. Season with pepper and salt to taste.