He knew all about okra and offered fatherly advice to us boy pickers — use a sharp knife to sever the pods, wear gloves and a long-sleeve shirt. And oh, since it’s beastly hot and humid, wear a hat or a ball cap to keep the sun off your head, and maybe a bandana to protect your neck from sunburn. Well, fine. But you try wearing that outfit when it’s 92 degrees with 99 percent humidity as it often is in June in South Louisiana. It’s like working in a steam room fully clothed. So — of course! — on our inaugural okra-picking trip we go out to the okra patch in cut-off jeans, T-shirts and sneakers. No gloves, hats or neck protection. Well, between the biting bugs, the sweltering heat and the okra itch, we returned to the house demoralized as wounded soldiers and scratching like flea-bit hound dogs.
By Ken Wells
It’s perfectly fine to serve gumbo without okra. It’s still gumbo. Really. There, I’ve said it. Let the ranting begin! First, a backstory. I have a love-hate relationship with okra. I love to eat it, but I hate to pick it. The aversion stems from my childhood on the pastoral ramparts of Bayou Black west of Houma. We lived on a small farm of about six acres, where we planted ambitious annual gardens that always included two long rows of okra. My mother, Bonnie Wells, a Cajun French-speaking Toups by birth, insisted on the okra because she cooked it with flair and zeal, and loved to eat what she cooked. So did we. Memories of her smothered okra — sautéed in a cast-iron skillet with tomatoes, onions, garlic and various spices, including a dash or two of hot sauce — still make my mouth water. And of course she could not possibly conceive of her seafood gumbo without okra. Cook okra though she did, my mother declined to pick it or go anywhere near the okra patch. Okra is trouble. It does not care to be picked, and its stems and pods have rows of tiny hairy spines to defend it. If you brush up against these spines with your bare skin, you’ll learn that okra isn’t messing around. You’ll itch like you have poison ivy. Some people break out in full okra rashes. There are those, in fact, who insist that the 1960s dance craze, “The Twist,” was inspired by the movements of an itchy okra picker. It’s probably true since I learned of okra’s prickly side the hard way. My dad, Rex Wells, didn’t like to pick okra, either, but he didn’t have to. He had six rambunctious sons of suitable age (I being the second eldest) that he could deploy to the okra rows when ample amounts of pods had ripened and/or when Bonnie had an okra-cooking envie.
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We went back suitably attired but still considered okra-picking the most miserable form of work. My father — a U.S. Marine during the Big War and by nature a disciplinarian — took his cues from this. If the Wells boys had indulged in more than the allowable amount of mischief — that is, if we aggravated our mother enough for her to report us to our father — we would be lined up on the front porch, lectured and then given our punishment. “You’re gonna pick both rows of okra today — but not until noon, when it’s really nice and hot,” Dad would say sternly. “Maybe that way you’ll think twice about making your momma mad.” It’s no coincidence that Wells boy misbehavior went way down during okra-picking season. Okra was forgiven in my mother’s kitchen. But when it came to gumbo and okra, Bonnie had her rules: “I always put okra in my seafood gumbo but I would never put okra in my chicken-andsausage gumbo.” Her explanation for this seemed perfectly logical and I assumed — before I had a wider understanding of gumbo customs and methods — universal. Both of her gumbos were made with a roux. But with seafood, “You don’t want to overpower your seafood with a heavy roux,” she would tell us. “Still, you want your gumbo to have body, so that’s where the okra comes in — you use it not just for the flavor but as a thickener.” With chicken-and-sausage, she explained, “I like a dark roux. That already gives your gumbo a lot of body so you don’t need okra. To me, putting okra in a dark roux chicken gumbo is overkill.” (Plus, she would add, if you’re worried about body, you can add filé to both styles of gumbo at the table.) Well, since the only proper way to cook gumbo is the way Momma cooks it, the issue was settled in my mind. Gumbo doesn’t need okra to be considered proper gumbo. As I would learn much later, while researching my 2019 book, Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou, people have other opinions. Some people will have no truck with okraless gumbos. One of them was the late-great New Orleans Creole chef, Leah Chase, who for decades presided over the kitchen of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant (until she passed away last year). Gumbo without okra was blasphemy to her. Her attitude seems historically defendable. For starters, there’s about a 98 percent certainty that gumbo takes its name from the West Africa Bantu dialect term for okra — ki ngombo, or simply gombo or gombeau as it is referred to in the earliest written reference, back in 1764, to our beloved soup. Worth noting: A tiny subset of historians think gumbo derived its name from another gumbo staple, filé, or dried ground sassafras leaves. Native Americans, who were processing filé long before the Europeans and Africans arrived, called it kombo
