Gumbo, Filé (Picayune 1916)

Your own Gumbo, New Orleans Creole, Jeff’s starts with a cup of oil and a cup of flour cooked thirty-five minutes to an hour, until it is — your words — as dark as chocolate. This one, the oldest printed Creole gumbo I can point you at, has no roux in it at all. Chicken and ham are fried in two spoonfuls of butter, the water goes straight in, and nothing thickens the pot until two tablespoonfuls of filé are stirred in at the very end, off the fire.

That is the whole dish: a chicken-and-oyster gumbo thickened by powdered sassafras leaf and nothing else. No okra either — this book treats filé and okra as a choice, not a combination.

The detail that makes it worth cooking once: the book tells you why the filé goes in off the heat, and it names both ways it can go wrong. Boil it and the gumbo goes stringy; let it sit on the fire and the filé drops to the bottom of the pot. Most modern recipes give you the rule without the reason, which is why people break it.

UNTESTED — I have not cooked this one. It is the 1916 text, made legible, not a reconstruction.

Ingredients

• 1 large tender chicken, cut up as for a fricassee
• 2 large slices lean ham, about 1/2 lb, cut into dice
• 2 tablespoons butter (or 1 tablespoon lard)
• 1 large onion, chopped very fine
• 3 sprigs parsley, chopped very fine
• 1 sprig thyme, chopped very fine
• 1 bay leaf, chopped very fine
• 1/2 pod red pepper, seeds removed
• 3 dozen oysters
• 2 quarts oyster liquor, heated
• 2 quarts boiling water
• Salt, black pepper and cayenne to taste

TO FINISH — OFF THE HEAT

• 2 tablespoons filé (powdered sassafras leaf)

TO SERVE, IN A SEPARATE DISH

• Boiled rice, grains standing well apart — about 2 spoonfuls per plate

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt · Black Pepper

1. Dredge and start the meat. Cut the chicken up as for a fricassee and dredge it with salt and black pepper. Dice the ham. Melt the butter in a soup kettle or deep stewing pot; when it is hot put in the ham and chicken, cover closely, and fry five to ten minutes.
2. Add the aromatics and brown them. In go the onion, parsley and thyme, chopped very fine. Stir occasionally so nothing catches — a scorch in the bottom of a gumbo pot follows the dish all the way to the table.
3. Liquid, then an hour of quiet. When it is nicely browned, add the boiling water and the heated oyster stock, the finely chopped bay leaf, and the half pod of red pepper cut in two. Set it back to simmer about an hour. -> photo 1
4. The oysters go in last, and barely cook. While the gumbo is boiling, add the fresh oysters and give them about three minutes. Then take the pot off the fire.
5. Now the part everybody gets wrong. Have your tureen ready, standing in a bain-marie or a hot water bath. Take two tablespoonfuls of filé and drop it in gradually, stirring slowly, into gumbo that is hot but no longer on the stove. Pour into the tureen and serve.
6. Why, in the book’s own words: “never add the File while the Gumbo is on the fire, as boiling after the File is added tends to make the Gumbo stringy and unfit for use, else the File is precipitated to the bottom of the pot, which is equally to be avoided.” Two failure modes, both named. Boil it and it ropes; leave it standing over heat and it sinks.
7. And once filé is in, the pot is finished. “Once the File is added the Gumbo must never be warmed over.” If you want leftovers, hold back the gumbo and filé each bowl as you reheat it.
8. Serve the rice separately. Boiled so the grains stand quite apart, brought to the table in its own dish, about two spoonfuls to a plate of gumbo. The book is emphatic that the rice is never boiled in the gumbo.
9. If you cannot get a fowl: the book says to substitute the round of the beef for the chicken.
10. Compare with Gumbo, Okra, Gombo Févi (Picayune 1916) and Gumbo, Oyster, Gombo aux Huîtres (Picayune 1916) — three gumbos, three different thickeners, in the same eight pages.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t The backbone is The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, fifth edition, published by The Times-Picayune in New Orleans in 1916 and copyrighted 1901, 1906, 1910 and 1916. The scan is the Cornell University copy, and it is in our Reference Library: library.fubsypoly.com/picayunes-creole-cook-book-1916.pdf I read the quantities off the page images rather than the OCR. The optical text of this book renders every fraction as a hyphenated pair — 1-2 for a half, 1 1-2 for one and a half — and it misread the 5 eggs in Pain Perdu as a letter B. If you go back to the scan yourself, go to the page image. UNTESTED. I have not cooked this version. The measurements are the book’s, converted to modern phrasing but not re-proportioned, and where the original is vague I have said so rather than inventing a number.

Filé, and where it actually came from The book stops to explain it, because in 1916 it still needed explaining outside Louisiana. Filé is “a powder manufactured by the remaining tribe of Choctaw Indians in Louisiana, from the young and tender leaves of the sassafras.” The leaves were dried on a stone mortar, pounded fine, passed through a hair sieve, and brought in to the French Market twice a week from the old reservation at Bayou Lacombe, near Mandeville. The same women sold bunches of dried sassafras root for medicine. The book credits the Choctaw with the material and the Creoles with the dish: they were “quick to discover and apply.” That is a specific, checkable, dated supply chain, and it is worth more than the usual vague line about filé being “a Native American ingredient.”

The rule this book does not have There is no rule anywhere in this book that a gumbo must begin with a roux. Both chicken gumbos — this one and the okra one — have no flour in them whatsoever. The roux shows up in the seafood gumbos. Whatever else is true about the history of gumbo, “first you make a roux” is not what the Picayune taught in 1916.

Filé or okra — never both Under Shrimp Gumbo the book states the choice outright: “either ‘File’ or Okra may be used in the combination, but it must be borne in mind that, while the ‘File’ is frequently used, shrimp are far more delicious for gumbo purposes when used with okra.” One or the other, chosen deliberately. Your own gumbo runs okra and a dark roux together and finishes at the table with filé — all three thickeners in one pot. That is a legitimate modern gumbo and it is not this one.

Scale “The above recipe is for a family of six.” Increase in proportion.

Sourcing Filé keeps badly once it is ground — buy it in small jars and smell it before you trust it; stale filé smells of hay and does nothing. Four quarts of liquid to one chicken makes a thin, soupy gumbo by modern standards. That is correct for this book: the rice is a separate dish and the gumbo is served as a soup over it.

Still open I have not read the primary rulemaking behind the FDA’s 1960 action on sassafras, which concerned safrole in root bark. Filé is the leaf. I am not going to state a safety conclusion in either direction until I have read it. I also cannot date the point at which the dark roux became orthodox in Louisiana cooking. This book forbids it in 1916; modern practice is built on it; I have found nothing that dates the change, and an absence in one cookbook is not a date.