copyright Bettina Network, inc. 2009
A reader asked for a recipe and a cultural comment about New Orleans Gumbo.
The reader must know something about Gumbo to have asked specifically for ‘New Orleans’ Gumbo. There is cajun gumbo and creole gumbo, but top of the list is New Orleans Gumbo. Give me your family’s gumbo recipe and I will tell you if your family was upper, middle or lower class in Louisiana.
Tomatoes make a difference in making New Orleans gumbo. If you came from a lower-class family the gumbo recipe you have from your family will not include tomatoes. If your family had a bit of money and upper-class history, your family gumbo recipe will include tomatoes. How you make gumbo also tells whether your family lived “uptown”, “downtown” or “back-a-town”.
Gumbo basically differs by the family. One recipe for New Orleans Gumbo follows:
Before you start your gumbo, take one pound of shrimp (wild, gulf shrimp). Peel and devein the shrimp. Put the shells in a large pot covered with water and boil about an hour. Drain the resulting mixture and throw away the shrimp shells. This can be used as the liquid in the gumbo.
Chop or process – 2 onions, 3 green peppers, 4 stalks of celery. Sort of reminds you of New Orleans’ 1-2-3-4 cake – but that’s another recipe.
To make this gumbo use a large cast iron pot – no aluminum PLEASE! And glass doesn’t make as nice a gumbo
Put one stick of butter in the pot with about 1/2 cup organic, virgin olive oil. A new twist to gumbo with all of the new food ideas floating around is to replace the olive oil with virgin organic coconut oil. Some people like to add organic peanut oil. I don’t because I don’t want the taste of peanuts in my gumbo. It doesn’t add anything to the flavors. And that is not a put down of organic peanut oil because I wouldn’t fry chicken in anything else. I also would not use coconut oil because it also adds a pretty strong taste, which I don’t like – but to each his/her own.
Turn on the heat and let the butter melt. Put the ‘trinity’ – the onions, green peppers and celery in the pot and let the vegies cook until the onions wilt and the vegies begin to cook.
Put two tablespoons of organic, whole wheat, stone ground flour in the pot and cook the vegies and flour together until the flour begins to turn medium brown. This is not what you will find in other recipes, but this is my way. Most of the ‘cultural professionals’ will tell you to first make a roux – you can try that, but I like this way better.
What you add next depends upon your taste. Add thyme, oregano, sea salt, cayenne pepper to the flour mixture and continue to cook on a low heat. Add ham, andouille sausage, one can of organic diced tomatoes and the water from your boiled shrimp shells. Let this simmer until you see grease on top of the ingredients cooking in the pot. That has always been my sign that the gumbo, to this point, is done.
If you like okra gumbo, slice okra and add it to the pot. Once the okra has been added, don’t allow the gumbo to come to a boil. If you do, the okra will make the gumbo stringy because the okra will let out mucilage and ruin the gumbo. Keep it cooking, but under a boil – not even a small one.
Some people like to add shrimp boil to their gumbo. Some add sassafras. All kinds of food and herbs are added to gumbo depending upon the person cooking. As you experiment making gumbo you will find wonderful additions which create new tastes.
Gumbo is one food that is best created by a committee – or a family where it has been passed down several generations and all the aunts, uncles and cousins have had their say as to how it should be made. It gets better over time as the recipe changes with the cook.
When you are about twenty minutes away from serving the gumbo put in crabs and crab meat, shrimp and oysters along with the oyster juice. I wait until the end to add this because to cook oysters and shrimp too long they will turn hard and not be a great addition to this dish. If you are in New England and want to be a pretend creole, but need your New England heritage to colonialize everything, you might add scallops to the gumbo and replace the crabs with lobster.
Serve over organic brown rice – a rice as unprocessed as you can possibly find.
The best gumbo I have ever eaten was made by my grandmother. She gave me her recipe when I was about 21 years old. I was never able to make gumbo which came up to her standards, but over the years it has gotten better as I have moved away from the processes set out by the big “Creole” and “Cajun” cooks and gone with my own taste buds and memory.
If you have another recipe for gumbo or other stories behind your gumbo recipe, send us an email so we can make this recipe “Gumbo by Committee, an International Creation.”
_____________________________________________________
Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!
[give_form id=”3763″]
______________________________________________________________
Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.
Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.
Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.
Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net
This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com
TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com
This entry was posted
on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Bettina's Cookbook.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
