File' Powder & Gumbo Tidbits.

Since yesterdays blog, I learned some more things regarding Gumbo and it's ingredients.

The following excerpt is from my friend Berley who is in LaCombe, LA.who is telling me about using fresh sassafras leave that I would grind just before serving with the gumbo: “(They are) a lot more powerful than the dust you buy in the stores. Try just a half teaspoon or less in your own bowl of gumbo before you use too much. Add it and stir it in, and in a flash it is thick! “

“In my family, only seafood gumbo has okra, and Chicken and Sausage Gumbo has File' served at the table. But everyone has their own traditions and likes! Also, Gumbo in New Orleans is very different from where I am from in Cajun country. It usually has tomato in it, where ours doesn't. Some friends of mine don't like my gumbo as much as theirs (with tomato) because they grew up in the City.

I make my own File' from sassafras trees in my yard. I gather a huge armload of branches and let them dry. I "mill" it a little at a time in a spice mill that I reserve for that purpose. Fresh file is indescribably better than the stuff in stores. Try to find some. LaCombe, where I live now, is the home of the famous Choctaw Indians who made file' and rowed across the lake to sell it in the French Market. As late as the 70's, a family of Indians would come on the bayou here and gather a bunch of bags of leaves for file' to sell, according to a neighbor.

Good smoked sausage is impossible to find around here, too, unlike in Cajun country. I buy locally made grocery store Cajun and green-onion sausage and smoke it myself. It comes pretty close to what I get in Avoyelles Parish. Last year I bought a meat grinder with a sausage attachment and made my own. That was pretty neat. Every year around this time the local stores sell fresh sausage casings because so many use it for homemade deer sausage. I also made boudin, but it turned out terrible because the rice disappeared into a mush! Ewww!

Your Gumbo sounds really good! You were lucky to find good ingredients, but Germany is a sausage country. For a wedding in Las Vegas we decided to make a chicken and sausage gumbo for the crowd before the wedding day. All we could find was the chicken, or course and Chorizo sausage. Talk about nasty!! We ended up throwing it out and trying to make seafood gumbo. It turned out OK, but the seafood in the middle of desert can't be that fresh. We did add Rock Crab Claws and they were good.

So, the message here is, you can make good Gumbo anywhere, you just have to be careful what kind of sausage to use, don't use Chorizo!!!