All of these influences, and others, were on display at the gumbo festival. Linda Green, of Ms. Linda's Soul Food Catering Company, dished out a wonderfully spiced Creole seafood gumbo, teeming with enormous pieces of shellfish. Massive crab claws and shrimp tails poked out from the soup, making it seem almost alive.
A few tables down, Cherie Brocato of TCA Brocato, another local catering team, offered an alluring andouille and chicken gumbo, prepared in typical Cajun fashion, with a very dark roux. Brocato herself is of Creole heritage, but her husband and business partner, Troy, is from Cajun country. "Makes things kind of interesting," she said with a laugh.
Next to Brocato, Linda Moore of the
Praline Connection
was serving a classic Creole okra gumbo with "a little of everything," seasoned with some thyme and bay leaf. Linda explained that she fried the okra separately before adding it to the stew. "You gotta take the slime off it," she said. It worked.
Conversations about often gumbo inevitably turn to the all-important issue of how to prepare a roux. "I like making my roux in a black cast-iron pot," said Renée Tervalon, the gumbo festival's food coordinator, who has worked in the kitchens of Donald Link and Greg Sonnier, two major figures in New Orleans cuisine. "Cast-iron holds its heat really well. So it's a good conductor, to get the roux to cook faster."
Poppy Tooker, a well-regarded New Orleans cooking instructor and slow-food advocate, also offered some wisdom regarding the roux. (Tooker's gumbo credentials were burnished last year when she appeared on
Throwdown with Bobby Flay
and defeated the cocky celebrity chef in a gumbo cook-off.)
"What is not in the recipes, what I rarely see written down, is the element of adding the onions first," she said. "That's going to make the roux get darker because of the sugars in the onions. And then you can add the other seasonings--the celery and the bell pepper." That combination--onions, celery, and bell pepper--is often called the "holy trinity" of Creole cooking. But Tooker has little patience for that conceit. "All this bullshit about the 'holy trinity' of Creole cooking--that's a late 20th-century invention," she said, growing a little agitated as she explained that celery is hardly a traditional element of New Orleans cuisine. "It's really a Creole
mirepoix
. It's not the holy goddamn trinity!"
Tooker claims to make the best gumbo in the city (see her recipes for
seafood gumbo
and
"diaspora gumbo"
), but I asked her to suggest some establishments where one might find a reliably authentic version of the dish. She named only one:
Dooky Chase's
, where the legendary Leah Chase has been cooking for more than 50 years. Renée Tervalon agreed and added a few more places: the Praline Connection,
Li'l Dizzy's Cafe
,
Olivier's
, and
Galatoire's
.