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- Nov 26, 2016
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Chicken Gumbo (Pinterest)
It has taken culinary historians a long time to recognize the central role that African American cooks played in creating what we know today as Southern cuisine. These cooks were there from the very beginning, and their contributions really laid the groundwork by providing essential ingredients and techniques. There's no better way to taste that legacy than with a good bowl of gumbo.
Abby Fisher was born around 1832 in South Carolina, apparently the daughter of a French-born slave owner and a Carolina-born slave. She wound up in Alabama sometime before the Civil War, and from at least 1869 to 1876 she lived in Mobile with her husband, Alexander C. Fisher, an Alabama-born minister. In the late 1870s the Fishers moved westward to San Francisco, where Abby Fisher made a living as a cook and operated a pickle and preserves business with her husband.
Abby authored, "Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking" in 1881. It is the second oldest known cookbook to have been written by an African-American. She dictated her book to a committee of nine residents of San Francisco (her "lady friends and patrons") just a few years after she arrived on the West Coast. Abby included three recipes for gumbo. They are provided below.
Ochra (Okra) Gumbo (Pinterest)
Ochra Gumbo
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. Never stir rice while boiling. Season rice always with salt when it is first put on to cook, and do not have too much water in rice while boiling.
Oyster Gumbo (Pinterest)
Oyster Gumbo Soup
Take an old chicken, cut into small pieces, salt and black pepper. Dip it well in flour, and put it on to fry, over a slow fire, till brown; don't let it burn. Cut half of a small onion very fine and sprinkle on chicken while frying. Then place chicken in soup pot, add two quarts of water and let boil to three pints. Have one quart of fresh oysters with all the liquor that belongs to them, and before dishing up soup, add oysters and let come to a boil the second time, then stir into soup one tablespoonful of gumbo [filé powder] quickly. Dish up and send to table. Have parsley chopped very fine and put in tureen on dishing up soup. Have dry boiled rice to go to table with gumbo in separate dish. Serve one tablespoonful of rice to a plate of gumbo.
Chicken Gumbo
Salt and pepper chicken before frying it. Take a chicken, separating it from all the joints and breaking the bones, fry the chicken in one and a half teaspoonful of lard or butter. First well mix the chicken in dry flour, let the fat be hot, put chicken to fry until brown, don't burn chicken. After fried put it on in soup kettle with half a gallon of hot water, one and a half quarts of green ochre cut into thin pieces, throwing the end away, and let boil to three pints; season with pepper and salt. Chop half of an ordinary sized onion fine, and fry it with the chicken; chili pepper chopped fine if added is nice when liked.
Source:
"What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking" by Abby Fisher. San Francisco: Women's Co-Operative Printing Office, 420, 424 & 430 Montgomery Street; 1881.
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