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kind of in the small bayou city of New Iberia, a short hop away from the Gulf’s rich recre ational fisheries and the cattle-friendly rice country of the coastal prairie. Always an enthusiastic eater, I’d had plenty of different incarnations of the sainted dish growing up, and being the curious type, I always tried to identify different flavors and ingredients as I went. Okra was always easy to spot, as were the different whole animal seafoods (crab, shrimp, but crawfish). I could recognize the tang of filé powder on the tongue and the silky dankness of a well-made roux. I scarfed up bowls at friends’ houses and cold-weather family celebrations, and even went back for second helpings on days when our public school cafeteria featured gumbo on the lunchtime menu. I had decided that my personal starting point would be a classic: savory chicken and smoked sausage with a medium-dark roux. And my mother would pass along the Wisdom of My People, and I would under stand the world. The story that shattered my world was a tale about her mother’s gumbo and her accompanying aversion to roux cooking. It goes like this: When my grandmother Lorelle — a North Louisiana girl from Catahoula Parish — was a young bride (sometime in the late 1930s/ early 1940s), she was learning to cook for her new husband, an Hebert boy raised in Shreveport with deep roots in South Louisi ana’s Assumption and Iberville parishes. She tried to make a gumbo in the South Louisiana style — dark roux, deep flavors — but in her first attempt scorched the roux and gave the final dish a bitter, burnt flavor. The gumbo was barely edible, but not wanting to waste food, she served it anyway. My grandmother (we called her Mamma) was My mama only

“Chicken and sausage.” When I told her that, Mama took a second, shook her head, and then blew my mind. “I’ve never made that one. made shrimp and okra gumbo, and there’s a reason why…” The conversation that followed — The Gumbo Talk — was the beginning of a journey, the start of a Gulf Coast culinary education that has taught me a lot about tradition, culture, geography, family history and a world of flavors. It was my chapter of a South Louisiana birthright, and my connection to generations of cooks who developed a wildly varied food group united under a single name: gumbo. If you want to cook gumbo, you need to start somewhere, and in the days before easy internet searches and 24-hour food channels, your best option was also the simplest: Go ask your mama. At the time, I was in my early 20s and had lived outside Louisiana for a few years — college in Texas, a few years loosely based in California — and wanted to re-create the more comforting, yet complicated, dishes of my youth. I’d never stirred a roux, never set a pot to simmer for hours, never dallied with large-format Louisiana foods. When you live in Louisiana, gumbo just tends to need to make gumbos happen. I was ready. I knew the style that I wanted: a solid roux-thickened chicken and sausage gumbo, the workaday variation so common to our part of Cajun country. We lived

happen to you. When you live away, you

never

M y mother took a deep breath, exhaled…then smiled a bit. “Depends on what gumbo you want to make, sweetie.”

“Mama, how do you make gumbo?”

they seem. In one critical area of culinary life, you need answers.

seen just enough of life to know that, oftentimes, things aren’t what

There comes a time in a young cook’s life when they need to have The Talk. You’ve got questions about a confusing, complicated world. You’ve

TEAM TOMATO

By P. Johnson

23 Ingredients and Me