Fried Okra

Mom was serious about okra. So serious, in fact, that she purchased a silver brooch in the shape of an okra that she would wear on her lapel from time to time. One day I told her that my phone’s autocorrect changed “IKEA” to “okra” and she was so tickled that she immediately grabbed her phone to try it out.

Mom was also serious about frying things. She wasn’t afraid of a little cholesterol! Once, after spending the weekend at a Southern Foodways event, Mom came home and made deep fried pimento cheese. I wish I had her recipe for *that*, but it was done kind of on the fly. I googled it and this recipe looks legit.

As a kid, we used to go to this restaurant called Po’ Folks when we were in Greensboro. It was kind of Cracker Barrel-esque: home cooking, big portions, drinks served in mason jars (30 years before the hipsters were doing it!). I remember going when I was maybe ten and being excited to find out that if I ordered the fried shrimp plate, I got two sides with it, and those two sides could be french fries and hushpuppies. I can’t believe that my parents let me order this. They must have been worn down by parenting that day because you bet I did! Add about five mason jars of sweet tea and you have one carbed-out, caffeinated kid. The ride home to Chapel Hill must’ve been interesting. Those were the old days where we didn’t need to wear seatbelts. I used to lie in the back window of our car and press my face against the glass, letting the streetlights stream by like a psychedelic laser show.

There are many fried food stories in the Reed Family Chronicles. For one of Dad’s birthdays in the late 70s, he requested fried chicken livers. Mom obliged. Having never been in the vicinity of liver before, I found the odor so appalling that I hid under my bed all night. Another time Mom and Dad came back from a trip to New Orleans with a box of Cafe du Monde beignet mix. We fried those suckers right up and ate them for dinner! I don’t recall eating anything else that night but if she was ever worried about our nutrition, Mom would give us a multivitamin. (And, to be fair, we mainly ate really well, these stories are the exception.) Once my sister and I left the house, not only did Mom and Dad get central air and heat (what the hell?) but nutrition got a little, shall we say, “looser”. Mom and Dad had both put on a little weight and were anxious to get rid of it. Their solution? The “Scotch & Popcorn Diet”, of course! They ate normally during the day and then each had a scotch and half a bag of microwave popcorn for dinner. Feeling malnourished? They’d pop a vitamin! While their methods may have been suspect, the results spoke for themselves and I think they actually convinced a few other people to try this system. Classic John & Dale! Always the trailblazers.

So, in a nod to diet versus indulgence I give you one of Mom’s Fried Okra recipes (she had six in her files). It’s a little bit healthy (hey, it’s a vegetable!) and a little bit naughty. Leave out the bacon if you want to stick to veggie.

FRIED OKRA

1 pound fresh okra
2 cups buttermilk
1 cup self-rising cornmeal
1 cup self-rising flour
Sarah’s note: I’ll bet you could use regular cornmeal and flour. Some of the other recipes did, although self-rising would make them lighter.
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper Vegetable oil
1/4 cup bacon drippings

Cut off and discard tip and stem ends from okra; cut okra into 1/2-inch-thick slices. Stir into buttermilk; cover and chill 45 minutes.

Combine cornmeal and next 3 ingredients in a bowl.

Remove okra from buttermilk with a slotted spoon, and discard buttermilk. Dredge okra, in batches, in the cornmeal mixture.

Pour oil to depth of 2 inches into a Dutch oven or cast-iron skillet; add bacon drippings, and heat to 375°.

Fry okra, in batches, 4 minutes or until golden; drain on paper towels.
4 servings.

UPDATE FROM MY FATHER
”One reason your mother had so many fried okra recipes is that she wrote the okra section of Holy Smoke and seriously researched the question. Here’s what she wrote”:

Fried okra is served in many North Carolina barbecue restaurants, and we always order it when we find it. There are plenty of early recipes for okra, by itself or in soups, but we haven’t been able to discover when people began frying it, probably because it was something everyone knew how to do. In 1870 Annabella Hill published a recipe for okra fritters, made with mashed okra and flour and egg, which is fancier but probably not better than plain fried okra.
Fried okra is nearly as variable as hushpuppies. It can have a crisp, firm crust or a tender, tempura-like crust, or something in between. Marion Brown, in her cookbook, does not bother to give a recipe. She just says this: “Annie, our cook for many years, slices the okra into sections about ½ inch long, dredges the sections in flour, and fries them in hot fat.” Mrs. Dull, in 1928, gave pretty much the same directions, but reminded readers to salt the fried morsels. Here’s a recipe with a little more detail, from our Southern food guru, John Egerton:

Simple Fried Okra
Slice off the thick stem ends of 1 pound of okra pods, cut into ¼-inch rounds, place them in a large bowl, sprinkle liberally with salt, cover with ice water, and refrigerate until quite cold. Drain well. Roll slices in cornmeal seasoned with salt and pepper, and when well-coated fry them in hot fat about ½ inch deep in a black skillet. When brown and crisp, drain on paper towels and serve hot. One pound should make 2 to 4 servings.

One day, to go with our tomato sandwiches, we tried most of the flour and cornmeal variations we could think of with some tiny, beautiful okra from a roadside stand. We soaked half in good buttermilk and half in ice water, then fried each kind in cornmeal, cornflour, flour, or half-cornmeal-half-flour. We even tried sprinkling the okra with flour, then water, then flour, then water again, but it was a little tough and seemed a waste of energy. Surprisingly, the buttermilk made a tougher crust than water. We liked plain cornflour best. It’s a fine-ground cornmeal that can be ordered on the web. You can make a reasonable facsimile by pulsing cornmeal in your food processor until it’s as fine as flour. If you like a delicate coating, you could also try plain flour, which makes a tempura-like crust. Some folks swear by self-rising flour and cornmeal, but they didn’t seem an improvement to us.

We fried ours in peanut oil, at about 370 degrees. There might be occasions when you’d like to add a little bacon grease to the frying fat – maybe a quarter of a cup to your skillet of oil. Check after frying to see if it needs more salt and pepper. A little cayenne is always good, either in the breading or sprinkled on afterwards. We are told on good authority that frozen okra works perfectly well.
If you want something less traditional, you could try blanching whole tiny okra (1½” or so) in boiling water for three or four minutes and then frying them as above. It’s very pretty, but our taste is mostly in our mouths, so we personally like sliced okra better, to get more crunch to the munch.

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Sarah ReedMarch 6, 2021