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Traditional New Orleans cuisine is something you get at restau rants, but is also something that families make at home, and have keen and nuanced understandings of. Which is perhaps the main reason for the intensity of the gumbo discussion. “In Louisiana, everyone’s got a gumbo recipe, and everyone’s grandmother’s recipe is better than everybody else’s,” Cooks explains. “The lines that cross over into family recipes — it’s like holy ground. So I always tell folks if I can be the second-best in Louisiana — if my gumbo’s almost as good as your grandma’s or your grandpa’s gumbo, then there is no better trophy for me in the world, because it’s such a family tradition, such a source of pride.”

their own ideas of how to cook, and their own ingredients, and that likewise yielded new dishes of increasing elegance and sophistication. “To be a chef in this city means to always be a teacher, and to always be a student,” says Chef Cook. “And always remember: You’re just a cook. The term ‘chef,’ to me, is just a leadership kind of role. I’m still learning every day, and I’m still teaching every day but it’s an obligation, I believe, because the culinary world is always changing and being influenced.” American cities like New York are prone to culinary fads, and those fads radiate nationally. “What happens in New York is that new fads emerge at insanely expensive restaurants. But food is never a fad here. Ever. This is what we are. This is what we’ve always been. We were a food town before people knew what a food town was. And the preservation of that culture, the preservation of that history, the preservation of that story is essential.”

Thin Cajun Gumbo By Sarah Baird A

and up until the turn of the 20th century is that flour was a pricey import, and butter was expensive — really expensive. The original roux primarily used different types of lard in place of butter or oil, including, if you can believe it, bear lard. Also as a result of these sky-high ingredient costs, roux-based gumbos found more prominent footing in restaurant-heavy urban port cities (ahem, New Orleans) than on the home-cooking tables of Southwest Louisiana, where “thin” gumbo is still winning over new generations of fans with each bowl.

And while cooks throughout South Louisiana still love to bicker over whether okra or filé is the best gumbo thickener, one thing they can agree on is that both ingredients were used to make luxurious, decadent gumbos — one (filé) used by the Choctaw, the other (okra) by Africans — long before French-Acadians brought the concept of a roux into regular rotation. In fact, inside 1901’s landmark recipe tome, The Picayune Creole Cook Book , okra and filé are discussed at length in the nine-recipe- long gumbo section, but only two of the recipes — shrimp gumbo filé and oyster gumbo — involve a roux, with recipes like penny-pinching cabbage gumbo and squirrel gumbo going completely roux-less. A primary reason that roux- based gumbo remained

sk most people what’s truly necessary when making a good gumbo, and the majority would say that a thick, rich roux is as vital

as the pot the dish is cooked in. For centuries along the Gulf Coast, though, gumbo and its ancestral versions were made without a roux (gasp!). In many homes across rural stretches of Acadiana today, you’ll still find roux-less, or “thin” gumbo served with regularity. “If you ask folks in Terrebonne Parish if they make roux for their gumbo, most of them will say no. Gumbos in this part of the state don’t use roux as a thickener. Really thick, dark-roux gumbos are more common in restaurants than in Cajun homes,” writes Melissa Martin in her James Beard Award winning book, Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou . “I had never had a gumbo dark, rich and

something of a rarity in colonial Louisiana

thick from roux until I lived in New Orleans and tried the ones served in restaurants there. You won’t find a roux-based gumbo in Cajun homes on the bayou, but roux certainly have their place in classic Louisiana dishes.”

PHOTO BY ROMNEY CARUSO

16 ROUSES FAL L 2022