ALL THE SASS
Notes on Filé
THE CHOCTAW INGREDIENT AND ITS INFLUENCE ON LOUISIANA’S MANY GUMBOS
Story and photos by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot
A
few years ago, my parents—a born-andraised Mamou prairie Cajun and his twentyyear transplant Texan wife—stood at attention in a cooking class by Chef Frank Brigsten of Brigsten’s Restaurant, who was going to teach them to make a chicken and sausage gumbo. “Now I know y’all are gumbo snobs out there,” joked the chef, who had trained under Opelousas native Chef Paul Prudhomme. My dad—skeptical but eager to be proven wrong about the superiority of our grandma’s recipe— laughed. “What I remember most about that class,” he said, “is that he took a whole cup of file´—a whole cup!— and poured it into that gumbo.” Like most families in Louisiana, gumbomaking in my house has always been its own ritual. Rainy, cold days curled on the couch come to mind, the air saturated with the savory notes of roux. We breathe that smell in for hours upon hours, intoxicated and lazy. When it finally, finally comes time to serve, we wait in line with our giant bowls—critically judging each sibling’s rice-to-broth ratio. The gumbo we make—most often, anyway—is of the chicken and smoked sausage variety (Teet’s, always). Growing up with a host of little brothers who hated all things green, we’ve generally stayed away from okra, and instead thicken our stew with more and more roux. Snobs we may be in some ways (I still don’t ever order gumbo at a restaurant),
we have no qualms about using the jarred stuff—Kary’s to be precise. As my grandmother once said, “Why spend hours cooking something that someone else does better anyway?” With our bowls piping hot, we plop
a scoop of potato salad in the corner. I always add a few dashes of Tabasco to mine, and Dad always pulls out the tiny baby food jar that lives in the cabinet with all of our coffee mugs. Clear and label-less, with a blue Heinz
cap, it’s filled with the bright green powder that is filé. Using a tiny sugar spoon, I collect a dash of it—just like Dad taught me—and sprinkle it over the top of my gumbo ever so carefully. If I put too much, the earthy, thymey
brought home baskets of satsumas, freshly-baked bread, jars of pickled everything from his patients. The filé was one such gift, hand-harvested by some man whose name Dad has long forgotten. Using it as we did, as a seasoning—a dash, a hint—the jar never ran out until this year. “We’ve always used filé as a seasoning,” Dad said. “That’s how I’ve always known to use it. But this New Orleans chef was using it to actually thicken the gumbo.” He said that he was worried the taste would overwhelm the flavor, but was pleasantly surprised to find Brigsten’s result— though very different from our home-brewed concoction—rich and satisfying, dare I say delicious. Coming from the native sassafras tree, filé has been a part of Louisiana’s cuisine far longer than we’ve called this region Louisiana, and way before anyone had ever heard of gumbo. A significant herb in Native American— specifically Choctaw— culinary and medicinal traditions, the dried and ground leaves of the sassafras were originally called kombo. (Some researchers have posed the possibility that this is where gumbo as we know it got its name, As long as I can remember, my Dad kept our filé— though it is more likely given to us by a patient of his—in an old Heinz baby food jar. After finally getting to the end of it, he that the word “gumbo” decided to try and make his own batch. actually comes from the Angolan word for okra, kingombo.) That filé’s use in gumbo traditions taste overwhelms the meatier flavors today varies as it does is hardly a of the soup. surprise. The Louisianan dish is The expiration date on the baby quintessentially Louisianan because food jar reads May 2002. Working as of its infinite varieties, representing a country doctor for the past twentythe rich diversity of cultures across five years, my dad has frequently // D E C 2 0
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