The Pot Thickens

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.

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.

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 — sort of rhymes with gumbo. And filé figures prominently in many 19th-century gumbo recipes, often as a substitute for okra.

Ken Wells in the yard of the Bayou Black farm after returning from a fishing trip at Grand Isle.

As for okra, it isn’t indigenous to the Gumbo Belt or anyplace in America. It was brought from Africa with the slave ships that, by the early 1720s, had been arriving in steady streams to the French colony of Louisiana from coastal West Africa. One fanciful telling has it that Louisiana-bound slaves hid okra seeds in their hair braids, so desperate were they to retain the ability to cook the okra stews, usually served over rice, that were a treasured dietary staple.

More likely, the slave traders filled up their cargo holds with enough quantities of okra to feed their captives on the long voyage to America, as well as to cultivate and sustain them in their involuntary new homes. Both okra and that other gumbo staple — rice, also an African import — would thrive in Louisiana’s sultry subtropical climate.

And it’s not much of a leap to see how African okra or gombeau stews over rice mutated into the dish we know as gumbo today. One persuasive body of evidence: When, in 1901, The Picayune newspaper — the forerunner of New Orleans’ The Times-Picayune — published its Creole Cook Book of recipes going back 200 years to the very founding of Louisiana, it contained nine gumbo recipes — all containing okra.

Then, something happened to okra. It began falling out of favor for certain kinds of gumbo, specifically when the protein was meat or poultry, or some combination of both. That’s where the Cajuns, and the evolution of the dark roux, come in.

The Africans, whose descendants came to be called Creoles, didn’t have the roux, but the Acadians, who began arriving in the Louisiana colony in 1764 from Canada’s Maritime Provinces, did. Back home, they cooked with a roux, deploying it in a popular dish called poutine. However, that roux — a pale concoction with very little body — would bear little resemblance to the roux as the Cajuns reimagined it in the swampy Louisiana frontier into which most of them settled. (Poutine — basically a light-brown gravy poured over fried potatoes and cheese curds — apparently didn’t survive the New World Cajun taste test. Nobody I know in contemporary Louisiana makes it.)

Ken Wells’ photoshop rendition of his Bayou Black farm around 1960, during his okra-picking days. “At the Jeep, standing, my mom, Bonnie Wells. Rex Wells, my dad, in the driver’s seat. Youngest brother Bob Wells in the back seat. In the boat, Jerry and Chris Wells. Standing holding the fish, Bill Wells and me; foreground, Pershing Wells. On the porch are my Wells grandparents, Willie and Lora Wells, who lived with us at the time.”

Fast-forward to 1803, a time when we know the Cajuns were cooking a dish they called gumbo. That’s because a French journalist traveling the Louisiana coast attended a Cajun house party, where he noted in his journal (later published) that gumbo was served — for breakfast, after a night of hard drinking.

No recipe for this gumbo survives, but as we slide down gumbo’s evolutionary timeline it’s impossible not to note the total ascension of the roux — at okra’s expense — in the gumbo pot as well as the Cajun hand in the roux. I was able to trace gumbo recipes in several Cajun families back to the early 1800s — and they were all made with a roux. Yet, in that 1901 cookbook, only two of those nine Creole gumbos had rouxs. And these days, go try to find a gumbo made without a roux. (You can, but you have to look pretty hard to do so.)

In fact, while researching my book I dined in 60 separate restaurants spread across 15 South Louisiana cities. I ate gumbo in at least another 20 private homes, consuming more than 100 separate gumbos along the way. Of those 100 gumbos, maybe five were made without a roux.

And as for okra, sure, it remains a gumbo staple. But my mother’s method seems vindicated, since the vast majority of those 100 gumbos I consumed followed Bonnie’s rule: okra in seafood gumbo, no okra in chicken-and-sausage gumbo.

That said, purists should feel free to hew to their notion — antiquated though it is — that gumbo must have okra to be gumbo. I’d still come to dinner. Just don’t ask me to pick the okra.