I like gumbo. When I
was a bartender at Applebees working my way through college I loved
Thursdays. It was chicken gumbo
day. The soup du jour. At Applebees it was, as is everything there,
very very consistent. No surprises. It was really my only gumbo experience. Growing up in Northeast Ohio does not lend
itself to a wide range of culinary exploration, especially in the gumbo
arena. So the never-changing Applebees
gumbo was in my mind the “good stuff”, the norm.
Turns out that gumbo and normal should have NOTHING in
common.
Once I was married and branched out a bit in the cuisine
category I started noticing that each different restaurant had its own
wonderful variation on all sorts of dishes.
I realized that between the Midwestern food of my youth and the
cafeteria consistency of college food service and then the standard fare of
Applebees, the virtually endless world of food had been completely lost to
me. I had never really considered what
an artform cooking could be. Granted I
did occasionally get creative with hot dogs and ramen noodles when the grocery
budget had been blown on an unexpected Thursday night out. But this was very very different, and I
wanted to taste it all.
One of the things that I decided to make my goal was to
taste test all of the Toledo area restaurants' individual take on gumbo. There was no shortage of restaurants in
Toledo (not much else to do but eat) and unlike many of the other dishes; gumbo
was something I could actually afford in almost any restaurant, even as a
newlywed fresh out of college.
There was the peppery seafood-laden Joe’s Crab Shack gumbo,
the much more chili-like Hungarian gumbo of Tony Packo’s, the standard Creole
style gumbo from the Old Navy Bistro (my favorite) and the fancy lobster gumbo
of Mancy’s. All was wonderful. All was gumbo, all had very different ingredients
and very different effects on the consumer. One could expect anything from a general overall warming
of the body to an outright rush to grab the nearest beverage after each
bite. Whatever the effect I loved them
all. My next step was to learn to make
it myself.
What I found when I started to look around for recipes was that
depending on where you looked, they are all completely different except for 3
ingredients that seem to be the glue that hold the “gumbo” label to the
dish. Rice, meat, and heat. All of the gumbo recipes I found had these
three things in common. They all had
some form of rice or soft grain all had a meat or preferably variety of meats, sausage, chicken, shrimp…and
all had some level of heat. Spicy is
relative to the tongue of the taster. To
me if gumbo doesn’t make beads of sweat start to appear on your brow after the
third bite its nothing more than spicy soup.
Kid’s stuff. Starter gumbo. That was not what I was interested in.
Once I started in on my gumbo cooking adventure two things
happened. First I became more
comfortable with my wife working second shift at the hospital, because I could
come home from work, stop by the market and cook myself into a corner without
her seeing the mess or tasting my experiments and second, that using a recipe
for gumbo is not unlike copying someone’s biography and putting your name at
the top. It just doesn’t work. Gumbo is about exploration, variation and
experimentation. It is about using what
lurks in the back of the fridge and finding that it tastes great with okra. It is individual and it is NEVER exactly the
same twice. Alton Brown says it right
when he was quoted “Gumbo is a very spiritual food, and much of the
satisfaction comes from who you are eating it with.” It’s flavor depends on the environment. It depends on who its cooked for, and the
venue it is to be served. Its
ingredients depend on the region it is cooked in and what is commonly available
there. It is always different, yet
always gumbo.
I am remembering all of this now partly because I am admittedly
hungry, but mainly because as I have grown older I have come to realize that my
always standard and normal Midwestern family is changing. The flavor is far different from what it was
in my youth. It used to be predictable,
like the Thursday Applebees gumbo. I used
to be able to come home and have the same conversations and see the same people
and give the same hugs. Over the past
decade or so the recipe started changing on me, but my craving for the same old
taste didn’t. Some ingredients were
removed, Grandparents passing, marriages ending. Some ingredients changed, brothers growing up,
family relationships stressed. Some new ingredients
added kids, new spouses, new friends.
All very different, yet still family.
This happens to all families. And just like all families it is a huge
stress to mine. Feelings have been hurt,
anger has taken the place of acceptance.
The taste of the gumbo is very different now than it used to me. I am realizing that just as gumbo is gumbo
despite being different every time, family is family despite being different
every year. It still has the same
core ingredients; mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, spouses, kids and
grandparents and it is still spiced with all of the emotional baggage and love
that goes into every family stock pot. I realize that just as I did with the gumbo, I need to experiment to find out what
works best with the current batch.
No
matter what though, family is family. It
is just as varied and as diverse as gumbo and it can be too spicy and hot for some
palates. The key is to find an
appreciation of each ingredient, new, old and even bold. And it never hurts to have a beverage within reach.
