Iconic Cajun dishes: Gumbo

Published: Thursday, April 15, 2010, 10:37 AM     Updated: Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 9:48 AM

 By Brett Anderson, The Times-Picayune 

Matthew Hinton / The Times-PicayuneGumbo

One struggles to think of a dish from a cuisine of similar depth — Mexican tacos? — whose ubiquity is as thorough as gumbo’s in south Louisiana. It is a constant on the menus of restaurants from here to the Texas border as well as on the stoves in homes of every class and race located along that same broad swath.

The word gumbo is equally omnipresent whenever people struggle to verbalize the dizzying viscosity of New Orleans culture. There is a reason for this. Gumbo has no single history. It has a jillion, and you could say the same of New Orleans.

Around the mid-1970s, before the emergence of nouvelle cuisine and the subsequent surge in ambitious restaurants, before Paul Prudhomme took over the kitchen at Commander’s Palace, it was easier to track the differences in gumbo along geographic and racial lines.

Judging by the contents of Cajun cookbooks and conversations with natives of Acadiana, the thick, dark-roux gumbo favored by New Orleans chefs today is Cajun in style. It is now, at least in restaurants, dominant to the lighter, brothier gumbo that New Orleanians remember eating 40 years ago.

Mr. B’s Bistro201 Royal St., 504.523.2078Mr. B’s Bistro opened in 1979, and its gumbo ya-ya signaled the shifting tastes. The hearty broth leaves a thin coat on the back of your spoon, and it is dark enough to partially camouflage whatever pulled chicken and mahogany brown andouille doesn’t jut above the surface.

According to the restaurant’s cookbook, the recipe originated with Jimmy Smith, an early Mr. B’s chef approximating the gumbo he grew up eating in Cajun country, and its name is said to “come from women who would cook the gumbo all day long talking, or ‘ya-ya-ing.’”

Other great Cajun-style gumbo:

Herbsaint701 St. Charles Ave., 504.524.4114

Brigtsen’s723 Dante St., 504.861.7610

More iconic dishes native to Cajun country, Cajun versions of those found throughout south Louisiana and those that have been altered by their exposure to big city modernity:

• Cochon de Lait
• Courtbouillon
• Crawfish etouffee
• Jambalaya
• Alligator
• Boudin

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