INTRODUCTION

There’s about as many stories on the origin of gumbo as there are recipes for the dish itself. Here one food writer says the dish is French-derived, evolving from bouillabaisse; there another food historian claims It is Native American, citing the use of file (pronounced fee-lay) powder as thickening agent.

Well, yes: the roux and file that thickens gumbo are crucial to the dish, and roux does come from France, and file originates from the Native American use of sassafras. And other ingredients from other ethnicities surely add to the gumbo experience, like smoked sausage from German immigrants and hot sausage from the Spanish.

That said, New Orleans & Me is going to argue that gumbo is essentially a dish of Afro-Caribbean origin. If you’re familiar with the old trope of ‘gumbo’ being a culinary allegory for the ethnic makeup of New Orleans, you may detect another layer of observation in that assertion. And that is purposeful: New Orleans is, in many ways, a Caribbean city, and gumbo, arguably her most famous dish, is an Afro-Caribbean creation.

This writer, who has worked as a travel guidebook author in West Africa and Jamaica, believes the connection and historical thread is so obvious it is essentially self-evident. Rich brown stews served over rice are a staple of Afro-Caribbean cuisine, particularly in places like Senegal, the Gambia and Guinea. As What’s Cooking points out, a recipe “for a Giambo from Curacao reads like a modern Louisiana gumbo: onion, celery, a ham hock, a bay leaf, etc.”

It’s also important to note that gumbo’s original thickening agent is okra, a West African import and staple of that region’s cuisine. The case has been made that Native American ownership of gumbo can be traced to kombo, a Native word for sassafras, but it’s also worth noting that ki ngobmo, a term of Bantu-origin, is the word for okra. The latter seems a reliable source for cognate dishes like Caribbean Giambo, which are linguistically removed from Louisiana’s Native American tribes but shared the same West African-descended slave population.

In any case: enjoy gumbo. Enjoy it at Lil Dizzy’s Dooky Chase’s and the Freret Street Donut & Po-Boy Shop. And be grateful of the West African roots that have grown into the delicious stew we serve up today.