Gumbo Jumble

Jack Deatherage

(7/2020) While I often consider banana cake to be an almost complete food- grain(s), dairy (sour cream/yogurt and butter), fruit (bananas plus various dried fruits), eggs, salt, sugars and occasionally alcohol and honey, my body tends to disagree. I generally suppress such disagreement with sandwiches built with homemade breads, or stir fries containing rice noodles. Or pizzas! I mean, what else can the creaky, lazy, aged body want- besides an antacid?

GUMBO! Or so Middle Sister's high school friend, Darby Topper has me thinking after seeing a picture of a pot she put together. (The best Facebook "friends" constantly torment- I mean delight each other with stories and pictures of meals they concoct. Or so I tell myself to drown out the harangues I regularly get when I post pictures of my homemade breads, pizzas, cookies, soups, stews and roasted meats.)

With a sigh of surrender, I have to look up the definition of gumbo. Of course it's a Creole French word meaning okra. French? I much prefer the African (Bantu)- ki ngombo, though I can't pronounce it. So okra it is. But why would I crave okra? Or is it the rest of the soup I crave?

I've grown okra, twice. I've read the seeds are notoriously difficult to germinate so I use that as an excuse for my typical failures at growing enough okra to be useful. The one year I managed to keep several plants alive, and get a few pods off of them, I discovered I preferred them eaten right off the stem rather than fried, pickled or roasted. When asked what they taste like, the best I can come up with is "green"- slimy not being a flavor.

The seed pods are tender crisp when young, stringy and all but impossible to chew when reaching maturity. I tend to like them just getting stringy- "dietary fiber" I call them. The DW simply despises them. She classes them with pizza slugs- mushrooms. (I don't put much stock in her judgment, after all, she married Emmitsburg's idiot of record.)

I'm not going far out on a limb guessing it's okra soup I'm craving. Having burnt myself out building breads, cakes, cookies and muffins this past cold season I began lusting after beef, wild boar and deer pot roasts- preferably all those meats combined in the same pot! Several times this spring I've filled the house with the fragrance of onion, celery, bell peppers, garlic, carrots and browned meats heavily seasoned with whatever dry rub I could find in the cupboard, or concoct with the spices, dried herbs and salts I had to hand. Such body and soul satisfying fare they were. So what's up with the desire for adding okra?

Could Grandmother Deatherage have been correct when she chuckled over a cup of Lipton and remarked, "They say there is Cherokee blood in the Deatherages."

I can still see the winkle in her eye as she added, "Or it could be Negro."

Is some Bantu speaking ancestor's genes telling me it needs an occasional shot of ki ngombo? I'm cool with that! Traditional pot roasts- even those built on wild boar and/or deer can become tiresome after all. So it's off on a gumbo safari! And gods! It looks as if there's a gumbo recipe for every cook on the planet! Toss in its non-Louisianian relation- okra soup- and the possibilities expand exponentially!

Given that I rarely follow recipes (other than bread, cake and cookies) I'm flipping through my stacks of cookbooks and ransacking websites for recipes as look interesting and, as usual, wandering off on my own. Making a roux is currently beyond my limited attention span. (Eight minutes of constant stirring? Gods, I can't focus on anything for eight minutes! With the exception of a nice bourbon.) Besides, roux is a frog- ummm French word and I'd sooner explore Creole and Indian versions of the soup that seems to be based on okra and tomatoes with chicken as a protein.

Being an American mutt, my first run is made with Polish pork kielbasa, chicken thighs and shrimp. The DW insisted I not waste all the shrimp in my experiment, so I steamed them in Old Bay and vinegar, and she took a pound for herself. She had little faith in my first run at ki ngombo stew.

The first batch filled a 7-quart crock pot and lasted several days. The DW, to her surprise and mine, discovered she actually enjoyed the gumbo- even the okra, which had given over its slime as thickener to the jumble. I was disappointed with the kielbasa and in the middle of the second spoonful I was planning the next attempt.

Having only ever eaten gumbo once before- from a pot made by a cook who learned the stew while working a restaurant in New Orleans- I know what I'm missing from my own version. Salt, Tabasco sauce and filé. The first two I can cover easily enough, but filé took some thinking on.

When we lived along Crum Road (twixt Tract and Steelman Marker roads) I walked, or pedaled a bicycle nearly every day past a fence row with sassafras shrubs growing in it. After Mom told me the twigs had a pleasant flavor and were safe to chew, if a tad slimy, I took to gnawing on them during the summers when I could identify the shrub by its odd habit of setting three different leaves on the same plant. (Probably the same leaf going through shape changes as it matures.)

To my surprise, the shrubs were where I left them along Crum Road when so much else out that way has changed since the late 1960s. Having acquired a coupla sprigs of sassafras, I decided drying and grinding them to powder seemed too much like work. So into the crock went three whole leaves- representing their growth habit and a nod to the Choctaw Indians who introduced the Creoles and French to the spice. The only thing left for me to do was simmer the jumble for a few hours before steaming a pot of wild rice- another contribution from the first migrants to wander here from Asia before anyone had bothered to create a written language, though I haven't a clue as to which tribe- possibly Ojibwe.

The second crock of ki ngombo gained nothing from the whole sassafras leaves so I'll reserve them for some future attempt using less heavily seasoned meats. Perhaps a fish and oyster stew? Gods! The DW is already building the Balor of the evil eye glare to scorch me with. She hates oysters worse than pizza slugs! (Women! They really should stay out of my kitchens and just be happy I let them eat the meals I slave over.)

Beings we have a second 7-quart crock pot I see no reason not to begin another stew while me and the dogs finish of the last of the current one. Heavily marinaded chicken drumsticks are slow cooking on the kettle grill for the third run at ki ngombo. Why not add some smoke to the jumble? The Creoles and Indians cooked their stews over wood fires and added ash along with the smoke.