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the Holiday issue

made their way onto social media, accusing Disney of sin, sacrilege and downright desecration of a Gulf Coast classic. Self- identified Cajuns the world over registered their displeasure with parody memes, handwringing and invocation of long- passed ancestors. As modern Internet outrages go, it was quick and relatively painless. Media outlets picked up on the joke and wrote fluffy trend pieces on the Facebook fury with all its mockery, humor and snark. Within a couple of days, Disney pulled the recipe and video, handing a victory to the commenters and parodists. From their perspective, the barbarians had been beaten and our culinary culture preserved. Gumbogate brings up some important questions when it comes to one of our culinary cornerstones: What is the essence of gumbo? What does our gumbo say about Gulf Coast food culture? And who gets to enforce the traditional culinary boundaries? In short: What do we talk about when we talk about gumbo? A Working Definition Along the food-crazy Gulf Coast, gumbo isn’t so much a dish as it is a culinary genre like stew or soup — a broad category that can include a wide range of core ingredients and cooking techniques. In the broadest sense, gumbo is a savory, thick-bodied middle ground between stew and soup — a hearty concoction, chunky with the bounty of barnyard, water and sky.We crave a steaming bowl when cool winds sweep down from the north, but there are summertime versions that contain the summer-peak crops as well (shrimp and okra to be precise). Our region’s gift to the global soup course, it’s usually served with a scoop or two of fluffy white rice and, in some Cajun households, a scoop of creamy potato salad or the occasional roasted sweet potato. It’s common knowledge that every local cook has their own foolproof gumbo formula, or a handful of special occasion gumbos for holidays, hunting season or the time when Uncle Raymond takes out the trawling nets. In the kitchen, gumbo can be a big-batch, freezer-friendly best friend that contains tasty, tasty multitudes. It can be a “make a pot of rice” last-minute meal or a self-

Gumbo on the Gulf Coast by Pableaux Johnson

I n mid-September this year, Disney Family posted a short cooking video featuring a healthy, vegetable-centric dish featuring shrimp, okra, kale and quinoa (a trendy Peruvian grain) instead of rice.The “how to cook it” movie for “Tiana’s Healthy Gumbo” ran just under two minutes and featured a peppy Dixieland soundtrack from the studio’s 2009 movie The Princess and the Frog, a fairy tale adaptation set in south Louisiana wetlands. The whole thing seemed innocent enough,

except for one critical misstep: They called the dish “gumbo.” Within minutes of the video’s Facebook debut, Louisiana cooks at home and abroad were heaping scorn on the dish, screaming about many aspects of the recipe that violated their version from the Sacred Gumbo Code. The transgressions ranged from ingredient choice (kale? Crushed bay leaf? Chili powder?) to thickening it with a little bit of un-browned wheat flour. A floodtide of humorous/furious comments

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2016