Bradshaw
The approach of the recent cold snap brought with it the inevitable comment from several people that “gumbo weather is coming,” which caused me to wonder how cold weather and gumbo got to be so connected.
Hoping to find out, I turned to Michael Martin, the head of the UL history department who has studied and written about our cultural history. His reply: “I have no idea how or when gumbo became a cold weather dish, but I’m happy to speculate.”
He suggested that it may have something to do with harvest seasons.
“Oysters, if we go by the ‘R’ rule, should be eaten between September and April – that’s pretty close to gumbo season,” he writes. “Crabs don’t really fit, though. White shrimp coincides nicely with gumbo time, but brown ones don’t.” He also notes that rice and okra, both used in or with gumbo, are also harvested about this time.
“Something deep in the recesses of my brain is telling me that tying gumbo to a season has something to do with cooking technology,” he said. “Perhaps when most people were cooking with Dutch ovens and the like, they ate gumbo throughout the year. But once modern stoves and ovens came along, new frontiers of cooking were available, and thus gumbo was edged out – or relegated to a specific time of the year.”
The question may also be tied up with where we live and what we call a gumbo. Paige Gutierrez in the definitive book Cajun Foodways (University Press of Mississippi, 1992) points out, “Popular writers and cookbook editors are fond of tracing the origin of Louisiana gumbo in terms of the contributions made … by the various groups of early settlers.”
Bradshaw
The first French colonists brought the concept of a fish stew but used Louisiana finfish and shellfish instead of fish found in Europe. The Spanish added hot peppers, the Africans added okra, and the Choctaws added filé powder. Gutierrez found that the Acadians dropped finfish from the dish but kept shrimp and shellfish for a seafood gumbo. Prairie Cajuns also favor chicken and pork sausage gumbo over seafood.
That tends to go along with Martin’s ideas about harvest time, since boucheries were generally held as the weather cooled and pork sausage would be plentiful. It also goes along with my recollection that as a kid growing up on the Lake Charles lake bank, we ate seafood gumbo in warm times when we could catch perch and crabs from our wharf and Gulf shrimp were easy to find, but ate chicken and sausage gumbo once the lake cooled.
Martin warned several times that his speculation “is all just me thinking … don’t take any of this as definitive,” but concludes that “the most obvious answer is probably the closest to the truth: gumbo, like other soups and stews, is a warming food that lends itself to cooler temperatures.”
Gutierrez adds the observation that gumbo is “an economical dish … [that] allows the cook to feed a large number of people with a small amount of meat or seafood.”
Warming, economical, and food for a lot of people – that’s probably why gumbo is also associated with festive occasions.
French traveler and naturalist C.C. Robin gave us the earliest documented account of gumbo in Louisiana in his 1807 book Voyages dans l’intérieur de la Louisiane. He said it was served at a bal de maison (house dance), which would have been a gathering of a good number of people. Robin said the gumbo was served with cornmeal mush rather than rice, which was common at the time.
Warmth, economy and abundance also explain why gathering ingredients for a gumbo is the alleged reason for a festive dash through the countryside on a chilly Mardi Gras courrir.
If they made the Mardi Gras run in the summer, they’d probably gather the fixings for a crawfish boil, which has become everyone’s warm weather favorite and probably helped push gumbo into the cold.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@ gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
