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bear little resemblance to the roux as the Cajuns reimagined it in the swampy Louisiana frontier into which most of them settled. (Poutine — basically a light-brown gravy poured over fried potatoes and cheese curds — apparently didn’t survive the New World Cajun taste test. Nobody I know in contemporary Louisiana makes it.) Fast-forward to 1803, a time when we know the Cajuns were cooking a dish they called gumbo. That’s because a French journalist traveling the Louisiana coast attended a Cajun house party, where he noted in his journal (later published) that gumbo was served — for breakfast, after a night of hard drinking. No recipe for this gumbo survives, but as we slide down gumbo’s evolutionary timeline it’s impossible not to note the total ascension of the roux — at okra’s expense — in the gumbo pot as well as the Cajun hand in the roux. I was able to trace gumbo recipes in several Cajun families back to the early 1800s — and they were all made with a roux. Yet, in that 1901 cookbook, only two of those nine Creole gumbos had rouxs. And these days, go try to find a gumbo made without a roux. (You can, but you have to look pretty hard to do so.) In fact, while researching my book I dined in 60 separate restau- rants spread across 15 South Louisiana cities. I ate gumbo in at least another 20 private homes, consuming more than 100 separate gumbos along the way. Of those 100 gumbos, maybe five were made without a roux. And as for okra, sure, it remains a gumbo staple. But my mother’s method seems vindicated, since the vast majority of those 100 gumbos I consumed followed Bonnie’s rule: okra in seafood gumbo, no okra in chicken-and-sausage gumbo. That said, purists should feel free to hew to their notion — antiquated though it is — that gumbo must have okra to be gumbo. I’d still come to dinner. Just don’t ask me to pick the okra. Left: Ken Wells in the yard of the Bayou Black farm after returning from a fishing trip at Grand Isle. Right: Ken Wells’ photoshop rendition of his Bayou Black farm around 1960, during his okra-picking days. “At the Jeep, standing, my mom, Bonnie Wells. Rex Wells, my dad, in the driver’s seat. Youngest brother Bob Wells in the back seat. In the boat, Jerry and Chris Wells. Standing holding the fish, Bill Wells and me; foreground, Pershing Wells. On the porch are my Wells grandparents, Willie and Lora Wells, who lived with us at the time.”

— sort of rhymes with gumbo. And filé figures prominently in many 19th-century gumbo recipes, often as a substitute for okra. As for okra, it isn’t indigenous to the Gumbo Belt or anyplace in America. It was brought from Africa with the slave ships that, by the early 1720s, had been arriving in steady streams to the French colony of Louisiana from coastal West Africa. One fanciful telling has it that Louisiana-bound slaves hid okra seeds in their hair braids, so desperate were they to retain the ability to cook the okra stews, usually served over rice, that were a treasured dietary staple. More likely, the slave traders filled up their cargo holds with enough quantities of okra to feed their captives on the long voyage to America, as well as to cultivate and sustain them in their involuntary new homes. Both okra and that other gumbo staple — rice, also an African import — would thrive in Louisiana’s sultry subtropical climate. And it’s not much of a leap to see how African okra or gombeau stews over rice mutated into the dish we know as gumbo today. One persuasive body of evidence: When, in 1901, The Picayune newspaper — the forerunner of New Orleans’ The Times-Picayune — published its Creole Cook Book of recipes going back 200 years to the very founding of Louisiana, it contained nine gumbo recipes — all containing okra. Then, something happened to okra. It began falling out of favor for certain kinds of gumbo, specifically when the protein was meat or poultry, or some combination of both. That’s where the Cajuns, and the evolution of the dark roux, come in. The Africans, whose descendants came to be called Creoles, didn’t have the roux, but the Acadians, who began arriving in the Louisiana colony in 1764 from Canada’s Maritime Provinces, did. Back home, they cooked with a roux, deploying it in a popular dish called poutine. However, that roux — a pale concoction with very little body — would

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