Oh, me. Me, oh, my, oh, file gumbo. I cannot be argued from this strong point, but then, I don’t expect to argue anyone else from theirs, either. Gumbo is a West African word for the vegetable we call okra. A number of African words have passed into common usage in the south. For example, around Charleston, if you asked somebody if they ever cooked with sesame seed, they’d stare at you. Sesame seed is something they use in restaurants. But bennae, now. Oh, sure; there’s bennae seed all over.
File is used as a thickener in NOLA and vicinity, but there’s hardly any need for it. Unless you’ve washed your okra until it is waterlogged, it will thicken the soup just nicely. Shrimp is all right, I suppose, but as much as I love shrimp—and you will never meet a Charlestonian who doesn’t love shrimp—it is a pallid flesh to set against the spices of gumbo, much stronger than those of a remoulade sauce, the strongest acceptable accompaniment for shrimp. The same for crawfish, though I love crawfish in any number of other dishes. Just don’t try to make me sit through a crawfish boil. The calories expended in getting the tails out and down your neck far exceeds the calories gained from the actual tails. It is like eating celery. There’s no way to win, no way to break even, and no way to get out ahead of the game.
The only meat to use in true gumbo is smoked ham. The very best is the meat of the hock, but that does entail a good deal of work, plowing through a fair number of hocks to get enough meat. But it is the sweetest part of the smoked ham, and might have been created to meet the okra and tomatoes and spices.
I won’t give you my own personal ground-up recipe for gumbo because then I’d have to hunt you all down and kill you. I intend to ask my assistant, Maria, to send me the recipe from Charleston Receipts, if there is one. Mind, some of these tell you to send the yard man to the market to purchase the terrapin because that is not the chauffeur’s job.
For those who would like to try the quick and dirty version I make, remember that any purist will sneer at you for calling it gumbo. At least, they will until they come back for their second or third bowl. And when you want some approximation of gumbo on short notice and you have less than an hour to put into assembling your ingredients, it serves remarkably well.
Begin with 1 and a half to 2 pounds of 85% lean ground beef. Put this in the bottom of your pot and cover it with chicken broth, adding more broth as necessary. Stir this until the meat has broken up into tiny fragments. No lumps, no pieces; it should all be a broth of beef. Now add 6 to 8 cans of okra and tomatoes. These should be plain okra and tomatoes. You can add any spices you need to. Now. Drop in two tablespoons of salt. Add your red pepper. I use flake red pepper. As to amount, I make a mound on the palm of my hand and toss it in, but this may be too much for some people. Finally, for this quantity of soup, forty-fifty dashes of Tabasco sauce. You may want to moderate that, but I find most people will enjoy it at this level, though I will add more Tabasco in the bowl. Now bring it to a boil, then lower it to a simmer. Let it cook for about an hour or until the liquid level in the pot has decreased by an inch or an inch and a half. Skim excess fat from the surface and dispose of. You want a touch of that grease left, just not too much. Serve as is or over rice, with fresh, barely cooked corn (Silver Queen is best of all) sprinkled over the surface, with piping hot corn bread. It’s quick-and-dirty without a doubt, but it is also pure quill good.
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