History of New Orleans' Gumbo

The interesting past, present and future of New Orleans' Okra File Gumbo!

Welcome to our blog post about the history of New Orleans' Okra File Gumbo. New Orleans is a melting pot of cultures, just like its cuisine... Being a native of New Orleans, when I became Vegan I really missed all of my old favorites like Gumbo, Poboys, Stuffed Artichokes, Oyster Dressing, and so many other fabulous dishes. In researching how to re-create them into Vegan options, I started learning about the history of our New Orleans' Creole + Cajun Cuisines (Yes they are different). Creole derives from when we were under Spanish rule and Cajun derives from when we were under French rule. But actually there is a third + fourth .... African and Choctow cultures as well.... In our blog we will share our unique "melting pot" Heritage and re-create via GRAB n GO Vegan!

In 1838, the Times-Picayune commented, "Secret of Health—Live Light and eat plenty of gumbo."

Meat was not introduced into gumbo until 1840 (present). So for well over a hundred years (past), gumbo was vegetarian. Now, (future) we want to establish "okra file gumbo" as a vegan + gluten free staple in our New Orleans's heritage prepared packaged product line... GRAB n GO Vegan!

The History of Okra, File and Gumbo

In several West African languages, the word for okra is ki ngombo, or, in its shortened form, gombo." Early on, the word was frequently used alongside "okra" by English writers. In the 1840s, when okra was just starting to be grown widely outside the coastal South, newspaper ads commonly offered seeds for "Okra or Gombo." "Gombo" is still the French word for okra today.

The roots of gumbo do run deep in Louisiana. Enslaved Africans were brought to the French colony in large numbers starting in 1719, and by 1721 more than half the residents of New Orleans were African. The first known reference to gumbo as a dish was uncovered by historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, who found a handwritten transcription of the interrogation of a 50-year-old slave named Comba in New Orleans in 1764.

A more detailed description was published two decades later in a French journal called Observations sur La Physique, which included an article on the American plant sassafras. The author noted that in Louisiana its leaves were dried and ground into a powder. "These leaves are used in sauces," he wrote. "A pinch of this powder is enough to make a viscous broth."

The article also noted, "This is the dish we in America call gombo. However, we must distinguish this American stew from the one called gombo févi (italics added). This is done with the pods of a species of mallow, known to botanists as the sabdariffa." Févi, it turns out, is the Louisiana Creole word for okra, and the author notes that its thickening power is even stronger than that of powdered sassafras, which the Creoles called filé.

But which came first, the févi or the filé? Some commentators have argued for filé and claim the word "gumbo" actually comes from kombo, the Choctaw term for powdered sassafras. There are countless examples of a dish made from okra being called either "gombo" or "gumbo." By the time Peyroux was writing his treatise on sassafras, Africans had been present in Louisiana for some 60 years, plenty long enough for their traditional okra-based stews to have entered the larger culinary culture of the colony.

The most probable path is that Louisianians were eating a thick stew they called "gombo" after its main ingredient, okra. Cooks found they could achieve a similar thickness using the filé powder made by the local Choctaw, and they started substituting that when okra wasn't available.

A New Orleans Icon?

Though well entrenched in Louisiana, gumbo was by no means a dish unique to that region. Indeed, during the colonial era and the early 19th century, similar okra-based stews and soups could be found anywhere a large number of enslaved Africans and their descendants lived—and, in fact, those dishes can still be found there today.

Tracing gumbo's roots is complicated by the fact that no African Americans recorded their recipes in cookbooks until after the Civil War, but in the early 19th century, recipes for gumbo started to pop up in writings by white authors. In 1817, the American Star of Petersburg, Virginia, ran an article describing okra, which it noted "is common in the West Indies." It provided two recipes. In the first, an equal amount of cut okra and tomatoes are stewed with onions, butter, and salt and pepper. In the other, okra is stewed in water and dressed with butter. "At St. Domingo," the writer notes, "they are called gambo."

Mary Randolph included a similar recipe for "Gumbo—A West India Dish" in The Virginia House-Wife (1824): okra stewed in water and served with melted butter. An 1831 article on okra in the New England Farmer noted the plant's "known reputation in the West Indies" and that, "a very celebrated dish, called Gombo, is prepared in those countries where okra is grown, by mixing with the green pods, ripe tomatoes, and onions; all chopped fine, to which are added pepper and salt, and the whole stewed." The 1841 edition of Webster's Dictionary defined gumbo as "A dish of food made of young capsules of ocra, with salt and pepper, stewed and served with melted butter."

In the mid 19th century, gumbo shifted from being a dish associated with the West Indies to one associated with New Orleans, perhaps thanks to the extent to which cooks and diners of all races had embraced it in Louisiana. By the late 1830s, New Orleans newspapers were already incorporating gumbo into jokes and aphorisms as a sort of well-loved local dish. In 1838, the Times-Picayune commented, "Secret of Health—Live Light and eat plenty of gumbo."