Who invented gumbo

The name derives from a West African word for okra, suggesting that gumbo was originally made with okra. Roux has its origin in French cuisine, although the roux used in gumbos is much darker than its Gallic cousins.

Carl A. Brasseaux, of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who has written the definitive history of the Cajuns, found that the first documented references to gumbo appeared around the turn of the 19th century.

In , gumbo was served at a gubernatorial reception in New Orleans, and in gumbo was served at aCajun gathering on the Acadian Coast. Today, the gumbos people are most familiar with are seafood gumbo and chicken and sausage gumbo.

But that merely scratches the surface of gumbo cookery, both historical and contemporary. Although there is no mention of a roux in any of the recipes, some of them call for the addition of flour or browned flour as a thickener.

Some of the recipes are made with various greens and herbs, but, curiously, there is no mention of okra as a gumbo ingredient, although the book includes three recipes for okra soup. Among the principal ingredients are chicken, ham, oysters, turkey, wild turkey, squirrel, rabbit, beef, veal, crabs, soft-shell crabs, shrimp, greens, and cabbage. By drying okra, cooks could use it in their gumbos year round. It is usually added to a gumbo just before serving, or at the table.

Many okra gumbos also incorporate a brown roux and some roux-based gumbo contain a small amount of okra, often cooked until it virtually dissolves.

Roux, of course, is flour that has been browned in oil or some other fat. Both cooks and eaters have their own opinions on how dark the roux should be and how much should be used in a gumbo. There is no agreement on these matters, as anyone who has tasted gumbos from different cooks can attest. A good place to sample an astonishingly wide range of gumbos is the World Championship Gumbo Cookoff that is held each October in New Iberia. A few years ago, I interviewed contestants about their gumbo philosophies.

As for the preferred color of the roux, answers varied from the color of a brown paper bag to the color of dark chocolate. So, too, for the desired thickness of the gumbo. Although the New Iberia event requires that contestants cook their own roux on site, the rest of us are not so constrained.

For some years, commercially prepared rouxs have been available, and they are a great convenience item. Dry rouxs consisting of only browned flour are also commonplace on grocery shelves and are popular with those who wish to reduce their consumption of fat. Contemporary gumbos are made with all manner of ingredients in a variety of combinations. Seafood and non-seafood gumbos are two primary types, and they may be made with or without okra.

But some gumbos include ingredients from both the land and the sea. Duck, smoked sausage, and oyster gumbo is one delicious example. Some cooks add hard-boiled eggs to chicken and sausage gumbos, and quail eggs find their way into other versions. Seafood gumbos often include crabs, shrimp, and oysters. Shrimp and okra gumbo is a perennial favorite, as is chicken and okra gumbo. Chicken and sausage gumbo is extremely popular, and in the households of hunters, ducks and other game birds often wind up in the gumbo pot.

Turkey and sausage gumbos appear frequently during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. An unusual but delicious combination is a gumbo of steak, smoked sausage, and oysters. Even back in the 19th century, almost every commentary on bouillabaisse notes that the key to the dish is the variety of fin-fish used to make it, and that simmering that fish is vital to add complexity to the broth. Of all the variations on gumbo out there, none of them start with broth in a pot, and even today fin-fish are almost never part of the dish.

Only later were shellfish like oysters and shrimp incorporated. It takes a remarkable leap of imagination—or, perhaps, a dull lack of it—to think that gumbo evolved from bouillabaisse. So how did that connection come to be made in the first place? Lolis Eric Elie has a few ideas.

He has also been one of the strongest voices decrying the whitewashing of gumbo. In a article for Oxford American , he methodically blasted food writers' long-standing habit of ignoring the contributions of black cooks to Louisiana's cuisine.

Instead, he argued, those writers twist and bend to invent tenuous connections to every European food culture from Spain to New England—including crediting French elites with the first gumbo. I asked Elie why he thought the bouillabaisse explanation has had such staying power. But the French mystique can lead us astray. In reality, no one needed to teach Africans how to cook gumbo. They brought its base ingredient with them to the New World and they cooked it using techniques that had been handed down from one generation to the next.

Far from being a food tradition unique to Louisiana, gumbo is instead an important part of the larger fabric of African-based foodways in the South as a whole. So if not bouillabaisse, where did gumbo come from? The answer can be found in its very name. In several West African languages, the word for okra is ki ngombo , or, in its shortened form, gombo. In the s, when okra was just starting to be grown widely outside the coastal South, newspaper ads commonly offered seeds for "Okra or Gombo.

The roots of gumbo do run deep in Louisiana. Enslaved Africans were brought to the French colony in large numbers starting in , and by more than half the residents of New Orleans were African. The first known reference to gumbo as a dish was uncovered by historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, who found a handwritten transcription of the interrogation of a year-old slave named Comba in New Orleans in Suspected of being associated with other slaves who had stolen clothes and a pig, Comba is asked whether she had given a slave named Louis un gombeau , and she replies that she did.

A more detailed description was published two decades later in a French journal called Observations sur La Physique , which included an article on the American plant sassafras. The author noted that in Louisiana its leaves were dried and ground into a powder. The article also noted, "This is the dish we in America call gombo.

This is done with the pods of a species of mallow, known to botanists as the sabdariffa. But I've not been able to turn up a single example of a dish being called "kombo" in any 18th or 19th century source, while there are countless examples of a dish made from okra being called either "gombo" or "gumbo.

The most probable path is that Louisianians were eating a thick stew they called "gombo" after its main ingredient, okra. Though well entrenched in Louisiana, gumbo was by no means a dish unique to that region. Indeed, during the colonial era and the early 19th century, similar okra-based stews and soups could be found anywhere a large number of enslaved Africans and their descendants lived—and, in fact, those dishes can still be found there today.

Tracing gumbo's roots is complicated by the fact that no African Americans recorded their recipes in cookbooks until after the Civil War, but in the early 19th century, recipes for gumbo started to pop up in writings by white authors. In , the American Star of Petersburg, Virginia, ran an article describing okra, which it noted "is common in the West Indies.

In the first, an equal amount of cut okra and tomatoes are stewed with onions, butter, and salt and pepper. In the other, okra is stewed in water and dressed with butter. Domingo," the writer notes, "they are called gambo. An article on okra in the New England Farmer noted the plant's "known reputation in the West Indies" and that, "a very celebrated dish, called Gombo, is prepared in those countries where okra is grown, by mixing with the green pods, ripe tomatoes, and onions; all chopped fine, to which are added pepper and salt, and the whole stewed.

In the mid 19th century, gumbo shifted from being a dish associated with the West Indies to one associated with New Orleans, perhaps thanks to the extent to which cooks and diners of all races had embraced it in Louisiana.

By the late s, New Orleans newspapers were already incorporating gumbo into jokes and aphorisms as a sort of well-loved local dish.

Meats started to appear in published gumbo recipes around this time, too. Eliza Leslie's Directions for Cookery includes recipes for both "Gumbo Soup," which incorporates "a round of beef" along with the okra and tomatoes, and just plain "Gumbo," the traditional stewed okra and tomatoes, which she describes as "a favourite New Orleans dish.

More common than beef in gumbo, though, was chicken. The version provided to the Mobile Mercury by Mrs. When West Africans were brought to the Americas during the transatlantic slavery period, they carried with them pods from the okra plant which was not native to the Americas. They planted the okra seeds in the soil of this new world and introduced their traditional African dish to the Americas. In this way, the enslaved Africans preserved their West African culinary tradition for preparing gumbo by transplanting its key ingredient, okra.

South Louisiana gumbo has been described as an intersection of three cultures: West African, Native American, and European. Each culture contributes to what South Louisianians recognize as its signature dish.