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Gumbo Filit a La Creole
Put into a deep pot one tablespoonful lard, when hot put in one tablespoonful flour, stir in until brown, then slice one large onion and fry it till brown; skim out the onion and do not put it back until a chicken cut up in small pieces has been fried. Stir it all the time. Have a kettle of boiling water near by; pour one or two cups of water on the chicken, stir well and let it simmer slowly. Add: 10 allspice. 8 cloves. Red and black pepper. Parsley and thyme if you like it. Put in two quarts of water, boiling, and let it boil gently two hours. Have ready the liquor from one quart oysters, put that in with the water; put the oysters in later, allowing them time to cook. When ready to serve stir in one tablespoonful filit, boil up once. To be eaten with rice cooked dry. N. B. Filit is only pulverized sassafras leaves, dried and sifted; you can make it yourself.--Mrs. S., La.
A Louisiana gumbo recorded by a Virginia housekeeping book, written for a cook who already knew what a roux looked like. The quantities are generous and the one genuinely fragile step comes at the very end.
- The filé is the hingeSassafras powder turns the broth ropy and stringy if it is boiled. The instruction to "boil up once" reflects nineteenth-century practice; standard practice now is to pull the pot off the heat, stir the filé in, and let it stand a minute before serving. Some cooks pass it at the table instead.
- "Filit"An idiosyncratic spelling of filé (from the French filer, to spin or thread). The note is accurate: it is nothing but dried, powdered sassafras leaves. Jarred filé is easy to find in the Gulf South and in spice shops or online elsewhere, and loses aroma over time, so buy it small and fresh.
- Sassafras leaves, not rootThe safrole concerns that led to restrictions on sassafras root bark and root-beer flavouring do not apply in the same way to the leaf powder used for filé, which remains a standard commercial seasoning. Use leaf filé; do not substitute anything made from the root or bark.
- The rouxOne tablespoon of lard to one tablespoon of flour is a small roux by modern gumbo standards, and "stir in until brown" means a peanut-butter to light-copper colour over medium heat, five to ten minutes of steady stirring. It scorches in seconds once it darkens; a scorched roux must be thrown out.
- The chicken"Cut up in small pieces" suggests a whole bird jointed, and likely cut through the bone into smaller pieces than we would use. A 3½–4 lb chicken cut into eight or ten pieces works; two hours of gentle simmering will fall it off the bone, and it is easier to lift the pieces out, shred the meat and return it.
- OystersAdd them in the last two to three minutes, just until the edges ruffle. Anything longer and they shrink and go rubbery. A quart of shucked oysters is several dozen depending on size; the liquor drained from them is the "liquor" called for.
- Whole spicesTen allspice berries and eight cloves are whole, not ground, and there is no straining step. Tie them in a scrap of cheesecloth or a tea ball so they can be fished out before serving.
- Salt and quantityNo salt is listed, as often happens in recipes of this period; season at the end, after the oyster liquor has gone in, since it is already salty. The total liquid is about two and a quarter to two and a half quarts plus the oyster liquor, serving eight to ten over rice.
- "Rice cooked dry"Long-grain white rice, steamed so the grains stay separate, mounded in the bowl with the gumbo ladled around it rather than cooked in the pot.
Filé gumbo is the branch of the dish that thickens with sassafras rather than okra, and the powder is generally traced to the Choctaw of the Gulf Coast, who dried and pounded the leaves and sold them in the New Orleans markets well into the twentieth century — the word filé is French, describing the threads the powder draws if it is overheated. That this recipe appears in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), credited only to "Mrs. S., La.," is characteristic of the book: Marion Cabell Tyree assembled it from contributions by named and initialed friends and relations across the South, so a Creole dish arrives in a Virginia collection exactly as one housekeeper would have written it out for another, with an explanatory note appended because readers could not be assumed to have heard of filé. That note — you can make it yourself — is a reminder that in 1879 the seasoning was a regional specialty rather than a shelf item.