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to research my gumbo book. What I found was that from Opelousas to Lafayette to Breaux Bridge to New Iberia to Thibodaux to South Lafourche to Houma to New Orleans, and other stops along the way, the gumbo spirit — joy and pride in food, family and place — is as strong as I remembered it in my Bayou Black days. More surprising is how our beautiful and tasty comfort food, so long a secret of the Gumbo Belt, has moved onto a national and even international stage in respectful ways that I could’ve never predicted. I leave you with one example. In Chicago, where I live now, there are at least seven gumbo-serv- ing restaurants that I’ve discovered. One, called Heaven on Seven, sits in a nondescript office building just off the city’s downtown Mag- nificent Mile. But when the elevator opens to the seventh floor, you walk into South Louisiana — Mardi Gras beads and “Blue Dog” post- ers on the walls, Abita Amber on the menu, Cajun music on the sound system and the smell of gumbo wafting through the air. Heaven on Seven is owned by a Chicago-born…Greek family. The gumbo is made with a roux and, while it might not stand up to the exquisite gumbos cooked in the Motherland, it is very good gumbo — the real deal. And so when I inquire as to how this came to be, the young woman at the counter tells me that 20 or so years ago, her dad visited South Louisiana and fell in love with the food and the people. He came back to Chicago vowing to open a Cajun restaurant. And in an act that seems crazy, he called the most famous chef he knew to beg him to teach him how to make gumbo. The chef? Paul Prudhomme. The best part of the story: Paul Prudhomme — by then a superstar chef — called him back and told him to come on down and he would teach him the Gumbo Way. Is that not a beautiful story?

outskirts of Houma. There was no room for a big garden there, although Dad still faithfully planted his Creole tomatoes every spring along their backyard fence line. Bonnie kept the gumbo pot going. By this time I had enrolled at Nicholls State in Thibodaux and would soon move there to avoid the daily commute. Happily, I had gumbo connections in Thibodaux as well. My Maw-Maw Toups lived with my Uncle Pershing Toups and his kindly wife, Ann Adele Naquin. Of course they could cook! Every- body with a Cajun or Creole surname in Thibodaux could cook. I was working as a part-time reporter for the Houma paper and had little money and, anyway, the cheap lunchtime tuna sandwiches at the Aquinas Center on campus were no substitute for my chief com- fort food. So a couple of days a week, I would just happen to show up at the Toups’ house on Spruce Street right around noon. The Toupses kept an open house — no need to call, just come and come hungry. Oh, my. Reliably, I would walk into a kitchen where red beans or white beans and rice with sausage, chicken stew or gumbo, usually chicken-and-sausage, was on the stove. Sides? Always potato salad, sometime smothered green beans, smothered potatoes or okra. Here’s how it went: Me: “Hey, y’all, it sure smells good in here.” Maw-Maw: “You must be hungry, cher. Come get you a bowl.” Me: “Oh, well, are you sure?” Maw-Maw: “Mais, cher, look at you. You so skinny. Eat, cher!” Me: “Okay — if it’s not too much trouble.” Maw-Maw: “As if you ever been trouble, Kenny. And I know how much you like your gumbo.” And so I would have a bowl of gumbo (and usually two), and we would talk and catch up, sometimes the Toupses lapsing into Cajun French, which I could understand well enough, though I do not speak it. And I would drive away thinking how lucky I was to have been born in this place. Half a century later, I drove the length and breadth of the Gumbo Belt, eating gumbo in more than 60 restaurants and dozens of homes

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