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Once the greens are well drained, chop them up finely, either by hand or with a food processor. If you are using frozen greens, cook according to package directions with spices, then drain and reserve the cooking liquid. Melt the shortening in a large skillet and brown the salt meat or ham, yellow onions and garlic. Add the chopped green onions to the skillet. Return the greens to the reserved liquid and add the cooked salt meat, onions and garlic. Simmer for about 2 hours. Some people add a couple of teaspoons of white vinegar during this cooking time. Correct the seasonings to taste. When it is prepared in this manner, you can choose to eat the gumbo with or without rice. If it is to be a Lenten dish, substitute 2 pints of oysters and their liquor for the salt meat or ham. Sunday Supper By Poppy Tooker L eah Chase believed the problems of the world could all be solved over a bowl of gumbo. After all, in the 1960s she had observed her theory in action, as Black New Orleans civil rights leaders and White politicians sat down together over countless bowls of gumbo in Dooky Chase’s upper room to craft an end to segregation. Much was made of her admonishment of Barack Obama when he picked up a bottle of hot sauce as a bowl of her gumbo was placed before him. “Mr. President, you do not put hot sauce in my gumbo!” she’s often quoted as saying, when her warning actually included the final words, “…before you taste it!” The taste of Leah’s gumbo was complex, something she often referred to as Creole. “Creole gumbo is more like a soup, where you get what you get,” Leah said. “You might get a piece of chicken. You might get a shrimp. You might get a sausage or a little piece of veal stew meat. That veal picks up the flavor from all the other ingredients.” Gumbo featured largely in Leah’s life long before her days at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant. Growing up in Madisonville, Louisiana as the eldest of 11 children, Leah recalled that there was always gumbo at Sunday dinner. “When I was coming up, we were so poor,”

she recollected. “My daddy and his brothers farmed 15 acres. During strawberry season, Mother would wake us at 4am. The farm was about five miles from home, so we’d walk there and back to pick berries before school. But we didn’t complain. It was a happy life. If there was a quail eating berries in the straw berry patch, Daddy would shoot him, and we’d have quail for breakfast glazed with plum jelly Mother made from a tree in the yard.” Leah’s childhood gumbo was filled with whatever was seasonal and available. “If Mother went down to the river or bayou and caught crabs, you had that in your gumbo. If it was squirrel or rabbit that Daddy had shot, that was the base.” Nothing went to waste. “We didn’t have freezers, so in those days to preserve okra in the summer, Daddy made us slice it and lay it out in the sun to dry on flour sacks that Mother had bleached white.” When the long strings of dried okra were gone, filé became the thickener for the gumbo. Sundays were special when Leah was growing up. While meat was often scarce during the week, there was always chicken on Sundays, stewed, or fried and served with macaroni and cheese — but first, there was gumbo. “Mother took great pains in making that gumbo on Sunday. Never a little pot — it was always a big pot.” Leah remembered with pride how her mother used bleached flour sacks she sewed into tablecloths to set the table especially for Sunday dinner: “We sat at the table for gumbo first. Everyone had a glass of wine, sometimes two.” she laughed. “Afterwards we’d get up and walk around before Mother served the rest of dinner. It was a simple life, but we were happy,” she remembered with a smile. Once Leah joined her mother-in-law Emily at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in the 1950s, her gumbo began to take on new promi nence. The gumbo served at the restaurant today is still true to what was served then. It’s Creole style, redolent with meat and seafood, full of flavor and tradition. For more than seven decades Leah served that gumbo to presidents, movie stars, musicians and anyone else lucky enough to pass through the doors.

LEAH CHASE PHOTOS BY CHERYL GRUBER

Holy Thursday By Poppy Tooker T z’herbes. The traditional Holy Thursday meal of meaty green gumbo has been a ritual of New Orleanians for generations, and a tradition of Leah Chase’s for decades. With roots in the Catholic Creole community, gumbo z’herbes was intended as the last meal before the Easter vigil fasting began. Gumbo z’herbes comes with much ritual and superstition. Aminimumof seven different greens must go into the gumbo, but that number must always be odd — increasing to nine or 11. An even number would bring bad luck. The good news? “You’ll make a new friend for every green you put in your Holy Thursday gumbo z’herbes, and you have to hope one of them will be rich,” Leah would laugh. Collards, mustard, kale, cabbage, turnip greens, spinach and Swiss chard usually made an appearance in Leah’s gumbo z’herbes. For many years her secret ingre dient was pepper grass, a weed gathered from New Orleans’ levees and neutral grounds, that often made an appearance at her kitchen door just in time to be included in the pot. In recent years, Leah replaced that obscure ingredient with watercress and here is one day every year when a different type of gumbo reigns supreme at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant — that is the gumbo

28 ROUSES FAL L 2022