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16 MYROUSESEVERYDAY NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2016
In mid-September this year, Disney
Family posted a short cooking video
featuring a healthy, vegetable-centric
dish featuring shrimp, okra, kale and quinoa
(a trendy Peruvian grain) instead of rice.The
“how to cook it” movie for “Tiana’s Healthy
Gumbo” ran just under two minutes and
featured a peppy Dixieland soundtrack from
the studio’s 2009 movie The Princess and
the Frog, a fairy tale adaptation set in south
Louisiana wetlands.
The whole thing seemed innocent enough,
except for one critical misstep: They called
the dish “gumbo.”
Within minutes of the video’s Facebook
debut, Louisiana cooks at home and abroad
were heaping scorn on the dish, screaming
about many aspects of the recipe that
violated their version from the Sacred
Gumbo Code. The transgressions ranged
from ingredient choice (kale? Crushed bay
leaf? Chili powder?) to thickening it with
a little bit of un-browned wheat flour. A
floodtide of humorous/furious comments
Gumbo on the
Gulf Coast
by Pableaux Johnson
made their way onto social media, accusing
Disney of sin, sacrilege and downright
desecration of a Gulf Coast classic. Self-
identified Cajuns the world over registered
their displeasure with parody memes,
handwringing and invocation of long-
passed ancestors.
As modern Internet outrages go, it was
quick and relatively painless. Media outlets
picked up on the joke and wrote fluffy
trend pieces on the Facebook fury with all
its mockery, humor and snark. Within a
couple of days, Disney pulled the recipe and
video, handing a victory to the commenters
and parodists. From their perspective, the
barbarians had been beaten and our culinary
culture preserved.
Gumbogate brings up some important
questions when it comes to one of our
culinary cornerstones: What is the essence
of gumbo? What does our gumbo say about
Gulf Coast food culture? And who gets to
enforce the traditional culinary boundaries?
In short: What do we talk about when we
talk about gumbo?
A Working Definition
Along the food-crazy Gulf Coast, gumbo
isn’t so much a dish as it is a culinary genre
like stew or soup — a broad category that can
include a wide range of core ingredients and
cooking techniques. In the broadest sense,
gumbo is a savory, thick-bodied middle
ground between stew and soup — a hearty
concoction, chunky with the bounty of
barnyard, water and crave a steaming
bowl when cool winds sweep down from the
north, but there are summertime versions
that contain the summer-peak crops as well
(shrimp and okra to be precise). Our region’s
gift to the global soup course, it’s usually
served with a scoop or two of fluffy white
rice and, in some Cajun households, a scoop
of creamy potato salad or the occasional
roasted sweet potato.
It’s common knowledge that every local
cook has their own foolproof gumbo
formula, or a handful of special occasion
gumbos for holidays, hunting season or the
time when Uncle Raymond takes out the
trawling nets.
In the kitchen, gumbo can be a big-batch,
freezer-friendly best friend that contains
tasty, tasty multitudes. It can be a “make
a pot of rice” last-minute meal or a self-
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