The regional table / Oklahoma
Fried Okra
Every argument about okra is an argument about the slime, and frying does not defeat it so much as put it to work.
Fried okra is on Oklahoma's official state meal, adopted by the Forty-first Legislature in 1988 as House Concurrent Resolution 1083 along with barbecued pork, chicken-fried steak, squash, grits, corn, sausage with biscuits and gravy, black-eyed peas, cornbread, strawberries and pecan pie. The enrolled text is not online — the Legislature's bill system has nothing for the 1988 session and answers Not Found for that number — so I am relying on the Oklahoma Historical Society: its list of state emblems and Dianna Everett's Encyclopedia entry on the meal, which agree on the resolution and the menu. Everett's entry is also where the plant's history gets stated plainly: okra was very likely carried to this hemisphere from Africa by enslaved people in the seventeenth century, and rolling it in corn meal and frying it is the way the upland South has eaten it since.
That method is in print earlier than most people assume, and in an odd place. The Griffin Daily News and Sun of Georgia ran a column on 30 April 1901 that quotes a South Carolina correspondent on the subject: boiled okra it dismisses as a sloppy, gummy mass, while the young pod rolled in stiff meal and fried brown, it says, would make a very palatable dish — and the paper adds that fried okra had by then been served for years on Dock Ison's free lunch counter in the town, where it was a favourite of the assembled connoisseurs. The same counter had made the paper once before, on 15 June 1888, when a one-line note recorded that Duck Ison now had fried okra on his lunch counter. On 11 September 1901 the Savannah Morning News printed a fifty-cent table d'hôte dinner with Fried Okra listed among the vegetables between string beans and mashed potatoes. The other document that matters here is not historical at all. USDA Circular No. 595 of February 1941, by C. W. Culpepper and H. H. Moon of the Bureau of Plant Industry, measured okra pods through their growth and concluded that the best eating is at 2.5 to 3 inches, about six days old, and that at eight or nine days and 4 to 5 inches the yield doubles with very little loss of quality. Past that the fibre wins: the fruit becomes, in their words, unpalatable a short time before it stops growing in length. A pod that looks fully grown is already too late, which is the whole of okra shopping in one sentence.
Why this version works
One inch of oil at 360°F. Okra rounds are small and wet, and a shallow pan loses its heat the moment they go in. An inch of oil carries enough heat to fry the outside before the inside collapses, which is the difference between crisp okra and a plate of green paste.
Cornmeal with a little flour. Straight cornmeal gives the best flavour and the worst adhesion. A quarter cup of plain flour in a cup of meal supplies the small amount of gluten that keeps the coating in one piece, without turning the crust soft.
Buttermilk before meal, not egg. The cut faces of okra weep a mucilage that is exactly the right glue for cornmeal. Buttermilk thins it just enough to spread over every surface and adds acid; egg makes a heavier batter that slides off in the fryer and tastes of pancake.
Small pods, and the thumbnail test. Circular 595 puts the window at 2.5 to 5 inches; beyond that the cellulose and lignin have arrived and no amount of frying gets them back out. In a shop you do the same test with your thumbnail against the tip of the pod — if it does not sink in easily, leave it, whatever the length says.