Molly Lehman

In the vast, nebulous, and heated—in several senses—world that encompasses Southern cuisine, there’s plenty of room for disagreement. With a culinary tradition so steeped in history, signature dishes—gumbo, cornbread, red beans, Key lime pie—are the subjects of endless battles over ingredients and preparation, never-forgets and don’t-you-evers.

But even with the most contentious of dishes, there are a few things nearly everyone can agree on. With gumbo, that spicy stew that began in New Orleans but has its abundant roots in African, Spanish, French, and Native American cuisines, most chefs agree it should have plenty of flavor and a good, robust stock. It should be well-seasoned, made with respect for the ingredients—and it should stew-thick and hearty.

Acquiring that last quality, however, is a complex question. Gumbo chefs with their eye on tradition have three thickening agents to choose from: okra, the leaf-green podlike fruit brought to the Americas from Africa and now a Southern staple; filé powder, a pulverized form of the sassafras tree’s aromatic leaves; or roux, a cooked blend of flour and fat that originated in French cooking. Most recipes call for at least one of these, and often a combination.

But why the dissent―and what’s the difference?

Like many Southern dishes, plenty of significance is placed on gumbo’s cultural history, and the oldest methods are usually considered the most authentic. But the question of thickeners in gumbo, it seems, might have been a contention from the very start. The word “gumbo” has two likely origins. One is the word kingombo, an African Bantu word meaning “okra”―this is where the French word for “okra”, gombo, comes from, too. But others say that gumbo is a variation of the Choctaw Indian word kombo, which means―you guessed it―filé powder.

For many Louisiana cooks, the question boils down the regionality and preference. “When we’re talking gumbo in general, there are two basic kinds of gumbos: the city gumbo and the country gumbo,” said Poppy Tooker, a New Orleans chef, author, and activist whose seafood gumbo once beat Bobby Flay’s on his Food Network Throwdown. “The city gumbo is a seafood gumbo, for the most part, and sometimes has meat in it, too―not smoked meat, but fresh hot sausage. It has okra. The country gumbo has chicken and andouille sausage, which is a smoked sausage, and it uses filé powder. Generally, you don’t find instances when people are adding both filé and okra to gumbo.”

The country-versus-city distinction has to do, too, with the often-hazy distinction between Creole and Cajun dishes. Creole cooking is generally aligned with city cooking―Creole-style gumbo often includes tomatoes, for instance, which were first added by the city’s Italian immigrants, and the port’s seafood takes center stage. Cajun cooking, on the other hand, is associated with rural areas, and its gumbos feature main ingredients more easily acquired in the country than near the city: chicken, smoked sausage, and sassafras. Tooker traces the Cajun use of filé back to the 1800s, before railroads had begun making flour available west of New Orleans. “The Cajuns were the ones making the chicken andouille gumbo,” she said. “They didn’t have access to flour, so they rarely had a roux.”

Now, however, roux is frequently added to both okra and filé gumbos—and a high-quality, well-browned gumbo roux is a particular point of pride in most Louisiana kitchens.

“Of course I use a roux; every self-respecting cook in south Louisiana uses a roux to make a gumbo,” said New Orleans chef John Besh. “The roux is the base from which every gumbo is derived.”

And the ingredients are important, too―including the right kind of fat. “You would never, ever, ever―nobody in southern Louisiana uses butter to make a roux for gumbo. It’s oil,” said Tooker. “Sometimes lard, or bacon drippings originally, but never butter. The butter would burn before the roux got to the right color.”

“The roux adds a great nuttiness in flavor to the gumbo,” added Michael Ruoss, chef du cuisine at Emeril Lagasse’s NOLA restaurant in New Orleans. “The more you cook it, the darker it gets, the nuttier it gets. You’d never use a light roux, or a blond roux, in gumbo.”

The sole exception to the roux rule, says Besh, may be the dish gumbo z’herbes, a traditionally meatless dish made with leafy greens and eaten around Lent. But this gumbo—whose name is derived from the French gumbo aux herbes―“really isn’t a gumbo in the classic sense.”

But what thickener―or combination―is best? The jury’s still out. One variation is using filé as garnish instead of ingredient: because it can become bitter or stringy when heated―filé is French for “thread”―the powder is now used often as a finishing touch on individual bowls. “In filé country, in restaurants and homes, you’ll find little bottles of filé on the table, and they’ll sprinkle the filé on and stir it in,” said Tooker. “But I’m an okra girl; I rarely, if ever, use filé.”

“We usually just use okra in the gumbo itself,” said Ruoss. “Filé is available to out customers who ask. And we do use roux in our gumbo. But there’s a gumbo called the St. Paul at Emeril’s Delmonico that actually uses all three, and it’s a great gumbo.”

“I love [filé and okra] both,” said Besh. “I like a dash or two of filé added just before eating, not to mention a dash or so of Tabasco as well. Both thicken, but in different ways. Okra cooks and thickens by becoming ribbon-like string as it releases a gum, while filé has a starchy type of thickening. I love the texture that okra gives and the flavor of filé. That’s why I use them both so many times.”

What most chefs can agree on, however, is the remarkable adaptability of the dish―a quality they believe encapsulates the region itself.

“Gumbo is our melting pot, the Jesse Tree of Louisiana cooking, with each culture adding its own ingredients to the pot,” said Besh. “Each part of our city makes a different gumbo, as does each part of our state, and each of them are a variation of how the roux is made as much as it is varied by ingredients.”

The state’s diversity prevents the dish from becoming the subject of a culinary battle, agreed Ruoss. “I don’t think you have, you know, the Cajuns versus the Creoles fighting over it. The dish itself is such a melting pot, such a mix of different flavors,” he said. “For most of them, you’ll start with the “trinity”―bell pepper, celery, onion―and add garlic, cayenne, other spices. But you could go to seventeen different people and ask them to make you seventeen gumbos and you’d get seventeen different flavors. And that’s really part of the foundation of New Orleans cooking.”

To that end, Tooker has developed a recipe for what she calls “Diaspora Gumbo”, developed for the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and published in Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook (Marketumbrella.org, 2009). “One of the things we did at that time [of the anniversary] was put together this handout that included all of the vital New Orleans recipes, so if you needed to evacuate, you could take those recipes with you,” she said. “It’s more of a formula than a recipe. It tells you how to make the gumbo base, then once you’ve got that base cooked, you can hunt and gather the local, seasonal ingredients and start making a gumbo of that place. And it really illustrates that, no matter where you are, you can still make gumbo.”