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Gulf Coast

fingers because the young pods should be small and delicate. In the New World, most of okra’s names reflect its African origins and ring with drumlike sonorous- ness: quiabo in Brazil, quingombó in Span- ish, and gumbo in French.The French term, which is taken from the work ki-ngombo in one of the Angolan languages, has given us the term gumbo.” One reason people might be tempted to call gumbo a soup is that it is often mistak- enly associated with bouillabaisse, a soup that hails from France’s Provençal region. Truth be told, there is more that separates the two dishes than that joins them. Most obviously, bouillabaisse uses primarily fin fish, which is seldom used in gumbo. Bouillabaisse also features a rouille, an add-at-the-table sauce of peppers, garlic, saffron, lemon juice and egg yolk. All of those ingredients — save the saffron — were readily available in early New Orleans, yet the cooks who crafted gumbo didn’t see fit to use them. Clearly, bouil- labaisse was not the Old World dish they were seeking to replicate with gumbo. Okra the vegetable, though indigenous to the African continent, is very much at home in the American South. Okra dishes can be found throughout the Afri- can continent. In her umbrella descrip- tion of African cuisine, Harris coined the phrase “soupy stew” as a sort of split-the- difference approach to the soup vs. stew question. “From Morocco in the north to South Africa, from Kenya in the east to Camer- oon in the west, the continent’s traditional dishes tended to be variations on the theme of a soupy stew over a starch or a grilled or fried animal protein accompa- nied by a vegetable sauce and/or a starch,” Harris wrote in her book High on the Hog. In Nigeria, where many Louisiana resi- dents can trace their ancestral roots, it seems that every dish is called a soup — okra soup, edikaikong soup (which features periwinkles in the shell), egusi soup (which is made with ground melon seeds), to name a few. All of these dishes can contain a combina- tion of meat and seafood, depending on the cook’s preference. “It’s never a soup in the Western way; it’s always a stew,” said

Tunde Wey, a Nigerian chef whose Lagos food stall was an early tenant in New Orleans’ reincarnated St. Roch Market. When speaking among themselves, Nige- rians usually refer to these dishes simply as “egusi” or “edikaikong,” Wey said. There’s no need to define them by the English words “soup” or “stew,” because those words offer no additional clarity to people already well-versed in Nigerian cuisine. Fatmata Binta, a chef based in Accra, Ghana, shares her knowledge of West African cuisines on her Fulani Kitchen website and Instagram feed, as well as

Another feature of Creole gumbo, the mix of seafood and meat in one dish, is also a feature of West African cuisine, though it is not common continent-wide, she said. “Throughout West Africa people do assorted meats, a lot different proteins. In East Africa I find they don’t mix two different proteins in one dish.They find it very strange.” When West African okra soup arrived in Louisiana, it was quickly Creolized by the introduction of Native American and French techniques. Filé powder, the ground leaves of the sassafras tree, was

photo by ROMNEY CARUSO

through her “Traditional Nomadic Dine on a Mat Experiences” in Accra. She said that the soupiness or “stewiness” of okra dishes varies across West Africa. “In Sierra Leone, it is more of a soup,” she said. “We do not make a base of sauce to make the soup. We go right in, put the water, boil the meat, then add the other ingredients. In Ghana I would say it’s a stew. They boil the okra separately and they put baking soda in it to make it more slimy, more thick like a stew.”

long used by the Choctaw and other local ethnic groups in their cooking. Simi- larly, the French tradition of adding a roux — a combination of fat and flour — also became a staple — not only of New Orleans gumbo, but of many foods that Louisianians hold dear. Perhaps it is just coincidence that both of these ingredients impart not only flavor to a dish, but also additional thickness. (Suspicious minds might wonder whether these early cooks were attempting merely

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