Filé’d, Slimy or French Gumbo?

In the sometimes petty, but often heated, squabbles that plague Louisiana’s cultural landscape, the culinary domain is often hotly contested territory.  Most of these disagreements arise ultimately from the very thing that makes French Louisiana unique: the diversity of the cultures that came together in our subtropical corner of the New World, as well as the diversity in the natural environment itself, necessarily means that the exact mixture of cultural and culinary ingredients will differ from one place to another. I myself, for example, growing up in the old Prairie Hayes, never developed a taste for seafood gumbo, while in the coastal marshes and in Southeast Louisiana, it is very often crabs and shrimp, rather than smoked sausage and chicken, that provide the dish with protein.  Gombo z-herbes (“herb gumbo”), made using a variety of herbage and sometimes lacking meat entirely, is common in the cultural orbit of New Orleans, but likewise never made its way into my dad’s Magnalite, even during Lent.  Similarly, it was not until I was an adult that I learned of tomato gumbo, common mostly in regions that in the nineteenth century saw the arrival and settlement of a significant number of immigrants from Saint-Domingue (Haiti today) or from Italy, whose soups and sauces were, and still are, heavily tomato-based.  The inclusion of eggs in the pot, is, while rejected by some, also quite common, as it is in soups around the world wherever households are routinely overwhelmed by the supply of yard eggs.

Yet further differences arise when the gumbo leaves the pot and gets to the table: in the old Avoyelles country, therei s very often a baked sweet potato that accompanies each bowl, while further south, where German immigrants and their Kartoffelsalat entrenched themselves in the late nineteenth century, it is instead Irish potatoes, prepared in a salad, that are commonly served alongside gumbo — a side dish that is, for some, almost as essential as rice.  Our taste for vinegar here in Louisiana, evident in old recipes going back centuries, sometimes reaches even our gumbo, with pickles, tcha-tcha (“chow-chow”), and hot sauce all commonly brought to the table as well.  Finally, for many, the very last step of the process before the first spoonful is a sprinkling of filé powder, thickening the dish and giving it a particular taste.  Enough of this powder, which, made from the leaves of the native sassafras tree, represents the survival of an indigenous culinary tradition, can indeed give gumbo its proper thickness, but it is instead a well-toasted roux, an innovation of European origin that is now available, already cooked and in jars, at every grocery store, which typically thickens most gumbos today ; and, of course, there are those who continue to put okra in their gumbo, as is still done in Africa — from where we get this vegetable, its two French names (gombo and févi), and a thick, slimy soup made with it.