‘Growing up, there was never enough okra’

Journalist Corbie Hill (shown below) was highly qualified to perform his assignment from Our State magazine to write about the virtues of okra. He grew up in Pamlico County, N.C., eating okra and loving it.

“We had okra in stews and soups and spaghetti sauces; we had it boiled. Mostly, though, we ate it fried,” Hill said. “There was something irresistible about okra after it had been chopped, breaded and pan-fried to within a shade of blackened.”

“Trouble is, there was never enough,” he said. 

To complement the yield from the Hill family garden, more fresh okra pods had to be purchased from Paul’s Produce, an iconic roadside stand, located on N.C. Route 55 near Trent Creek and about halfway between Oriental and Stonewall. 

Liz Biro, a former food columnist at the North Carolina Coastal Federation, wrote about okra, too. She said she got her first glimpse of okra as an 8-year-old. Her family had just moved from New Jersey to eastern North Carolina, and they were invited to a big, covered dish spread in their new community. 

“What’s that green stuff?” Liz quietly asked her mother…who replied with a hushed voice: “I have no idea.” 

What is was…was okra. 

“Okra doesn’t make friends easily. People don’t mind when it’s hidden in the Creole gumbos,” Biro said. “On its own, though, okra is an old-timer’s favorite that has never charmed the masses.”

“Yet, there’s much to love about okra,” she said. “Some Southern cooks boil, fry, sauté or grill whole okra, the stem barely trimmed, to keep the mucilage contained.” 

Biro’s mother learned to fry sliced okra (unbreaded) in a heavy skillet, adding fresh, chopped hot pepper and plenty of salt. The mucilage browned the okra, “making it almost crunchy,” Biro said. 

“I still crave the flavor and recreate the dish as soon as fresh okra season arrives, late summer in eastern North Carolina.” 

Okra’s green ribbed pods are delicately finger-shaped. Okra is best when picked when small and tender. If larger than an inch, slice off the cap high enough up so that the inner seeds don’t spill out.

 

As a rule of thumb, the okra used for boiling should be no more than two inches long. Fried okra and some other applications allow for slightly larger pods.

If the okra pods are bigger than your hand, they’ll be too tough, stringy and woody for consumption, the experts say. Feed them to the chickens.

Some families get their okra out of a can, and one of the South’s preferred brand names is “Margaret Holmes,” which was founded in the early 1930s by farmer Ed Holmes of Sandersville, Ga.

He named the company after his wife, Margaret, who helped oversee the canning operations. The Holmes family’s canning business was acquired in 1985 by McCall Farms of Effingham, S.C., which manufactures a wide variety of Southern-style food products.

Other major McCall Farms brands include Glory Foods, Veg-All, Allens and Bruce’s Yams.

Susan Slack, a cookbook author in Charleston, S.C., said: “The Margaret Holmes’ line of canned goods are “some of the tastiest canned goods I have ever eaten. Margaret Holmes offers cooked veggies ‘almost’ as delicious as your grandmother’s.”

“I was surprised at their excellent quality and flavor,” Slack said. She has taste-tested the three Margaret Holmes’ okra products offered – plain okra, okra and tomatoes and the okra-tomatoes-corn combo. “All would make nice additions to a pot of homemade soup.”

 

“I was prepared to add additional seasoning to improve the flavor, but found it unnecessary,” she said.