Word: okra
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Cooking by Ear. Southern cuisine arrived by ship or afoot from many climes. Slaves came from Africa bearing benne (sesame seed), okra, yams and remembered formulas that were to become the masterworks of Southern cuisine. Frenchmen marched ashore to reincarnate such classic dishes as bouillabaisse, which is a culinary cousin of gumbo, a permissive potpourri that can include chicken, turkey, ham, crab, oyster, shrimp or anything else on hand. While New Englanders learned-belatedly-to raise beef and sheep, Southerners derived sustenance from the wild game and pigs and chickens that were raised almost as members of the family...
Southern cuisine is an imprecise, ad hoc art that relies largely on instinct (a little of this, a little of that), memory (Mama said "Salt later") and the availability of ingredients (okra, salad greens, fresh shrimp). It is further complicated by the fact that many great Southern cooks have traditionally been black women who spurned the written word or, for that matter, any kind of regulation. The celebrated Mme. Bouligny, one of the last grandes dames of New Orleans society, had a Haitian cook who seasoned her gumbo with a voodoo prayer. "Getting directions from colored cooks," Harriet Ross Colquitt...
Many plants already in cultivation could be better used to increase food supplies. Spiros Constantinides of the University of Rhode Island has suggested that okra-whose viscid green pods provide the distinctive ingredient in gumbo dishes-could become an important source of protein if cooks would use its ripe seeds as well as its tasty pods. Researchers with the National Academy of Sciences have been studying a protein-rich "winged bean" that grows in New Guinea and Southeast Asia, and believe it could be successfully introduced into other warm rainy areas where the principal crops-yams, cassava, potatoes...
...Senate set a new and imaginative fashion in memorials to its revered members last week by adding a favorite dish of the late Louisiana Senator Allen J. Ellender to the Senate restaurant menu. It is Louisiana creole gumbo, a concoction of rice, chopped seafood and okra, selling...
...business who is known locally as the "King of Wings," reports that orders from whites for his fried chicken wings in barbecue sauce have nearly quintupled in the past two months. The craze has even spread to Paris, where Leroy Haynes, an expatriate Chicagoan, serves Spanish yams and African okra in his restaurant near Pigalle. Last Thanksgiving, Liz and Richard Burton took 58 friends to dinner there...