The Associated Press on Monday ran Vivian Howard's recipe for summer vegetable scallion pancakes, and its instruction reverses the usual advice: it tells cooks to keep okra's slime, not rinse it away [1]. Howard has the veg and the salt do the binding no egg alone could. Grated squash or zucchini, minced okra, corn and scallion rest with a half teaspoon of salt for five minutes; the salt pulls water from the squash, and that water activates the okra's mucilage until the mix holds together in what she calls "a gooey-looking mass" [1].

Only then come the dry goods — cornmeal and flour — followed by buttermilk, egg and hot sauce, and a rest of three minutes to an hour before frying quarter-inch fritters in a cast-iron skillet [1]. Howard describes the result as "a cross between a scallion pancake and fried okra," pulled from her 2016 cookbook "Deep Run Roots" [1].

The framing is the story. Short-form food video treats okra slime as the thing to defeat — blanched, blotted, or cut out. Howard, chef and owner of Chef and the Farmer in Kinston, North Carolina, and the first woman since Julia Child to win a Peabody for a cooking program, treats it as the ingredient that works [1]. "There's no vegetable more polarizing than this poor little pod," she writes, and only one part offends: "the slimy seeds" [1]. AP prints a method a reader can cook; the feeds print a reaction. The gap is a plate of dinner.

-- LUCIA VEGA, Sao Paulo