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Gulf Coast

the thicker the gumbo, the better it is. “It should not look like dishwater. By the time you put it in the refrigerator and take it out the next day, it should be congealed to the point where it looks like gelatin,” he said. This question is not confined to gumbo or even to New Orleans. The answer might just as well be found in the dictionary as on the plate, for the words “soup” and “stew” have different linguistic origins. “We’ll start with soup, since its story (like its broth) is clearer,” Sam Dean wrote in

vogue for breadless broths), the word came to us, and we started making ‘soups’ instead of ‘pottages’ or ‘broths.’” “Stew’s path to modern crockpots, though, gets a little hazy right from the get-go,” Dean wrote. “The first time that the Old French word estuve jumped to English shores as “stew,” it meant either a stove, a heated room, or a cooking cauldron.” According to the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, our word “stew” comes from the Middle English word “stuen,” which comes from the French word “estuver.” It means “to cook in a little liquid over a gentle fire without boiling.”

THIS IS NOT A QUESTION THAT IS APT TO COME UP WHEN A BOWL OF GUMBO IS FIRST PLACED BEFORE YOU AND YOUR MOUTH IS WATERING, either with hunger or with nostalgia for all those previous bowls of gumbo and the cherished memories that go along with them. No. This is a question you are most apt to ask yourself in the preparatory stages when you are reading the menu — or in the later stages — when you’ve made such a dent in the bowl that you feel suffi- ciently satisfied to expend energy on mere conversation. Your answer to the soup or stew ques- tion might be dictated by the nature of the bowl in front of you. Are you feast- ing on the relatively thin gumbo at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant, or the relatively thick gumbo at Upperline Restaurant? Even if you consult the experts, you may come away uncertain. The late Ella Bren- nan, whose Commander’s Palace restau- rant helped define contemporary Creole cuisine for generations of diners, offered a somewhat confusing personal history on the soup or stew question. Speaking in The Times-Picayune to food critic Brett Ander- son in 2004, she recalled her childhood experiences with the dish: “It was a shrimp and okra gumbo,” she said. “My mother didn’t always serve it with rice. If she was serving it as soup, no rice. If she was serving it as an entrée, with rice. Then as time went on, I remember very distinctly oysters being added. If she was feeling very ambitious, my mother would drive down to the market and get gumbo crabs.” Mary Sonnier, who owns Gabrielle Restaurant with her chef-husband Greg, comes down on the soup side of the equa- tion. “Greg’s gumbo is thicker than Mrs. Chase’s, but not as thick as a stew would be,” Sonnier said. “Though it’s probably richer in flavor and mouthfeel because of the stock and darker roux.” Arguing to the contrary is City Council- member Jay H. Banks who, though not a professional cook, takes his gumbo- making very seriously. “No sir. Gumbo is a stew,” he said. “I was always taught that

CHEF LEAH CHASE photo by CHERYL GERBER

the January 25, 2013 issue of Bon Appétit . “The word started out in the Germanic family, from a root that’s since grown into modern words like ‘supper,’ ‘sup,’ and ‘sop,’ and that originally meant ‘consume some- thing liquid.’ “This hopped over to Latin at some point before the 6th century to mean, specifically, a piece of bread eaten in a broth, a suppa. This then bopped along into French,where it started to mean both the broth-soaked bread and the broth itself. After a linguis- tic long jump across the English Chan- nel in the 17th century (and a concurrent

But any effort to use linguistic history to determine gumbo’s soup-ness or stew- ness comes fraught with its own dangers — for instance, for the European words that are being used to define a dish with distinctly non-European origins. The word “gumbo” is African in origin, and variations of it are used in several branches of the Bantu family of languages to describe the vegetable “okra.” In her book, Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to NewWorld Cooking , Jessica B. Harris wrote, “Okra goes by many names. In England, it is known as lady’s

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