Question for the true Cajun chefs...

No mixing seafood with the chicken

Only chicken and sausage for gumbo, shrimp was with crab or alone. In jambs it was pork meat with or without sausage.

Grew up in the Acadiana area.

No. Shrimp in a seafood gumbo. Chicken and sausage in God's Own Gumbo.

Jambalaya, I'm less of a purist because it's from way East of where I grew up and seems to have its roots in the Spanish paella. It should be pork and sausage and brown if done the way it works in my mind, but I'm not against a shrimp and sausage jambalaya with some tomato in it.

Don't do it.

I also don't mix crawfish with any other seafood or meat.

Not a Cajun here, but I don't see anything wrong with shrimp paired with chicken, sausage or tasso.
And as somebody else said though, I don't think crawfish goes with other seafood in a dish, or chicken for that matter.

A couple of combos I'm not so crazy about are shrimp and beans or shrimp and grits. They just don't seem to go together and I don't think either one is Cajun.

The only place I've read about mixing the two is here.

As a true coonass without the proper coonass last name, I will say that there is seafood gumbo, and chicken and sausage gumbo.

I do not believe in mixing the two.

I think we need to define "true cajun chef" too

My sister made an absolutely delicious jambalaya with shrimp and ham (and tomatoes!). If shrimp and ham can taste good together, why can't shrimp and sausage?

I just don't usually do it.

There are no rules...only opinions and these opinions are influenced by where and how you grew up.

Back when money and groceries were both scarce, people used what they had and a lot of what they had depended on where they lived. That's why the opinions vary so much by region. I can also tell you, that when it came time for filling a pot to feed the family, if they had to throw a few shrimp in with a little bit of sausage (or any other combination of meats and seafood), because that was all they had, then that's what they did. The same can be said for vegetables. Maybe they liked how it turned out, maybe they didn't but they ate it. If they liked, they made it again, If they didn't like it, then they only made it when they had to.

I remember reading, on here, a thread about boiled eggs in gumbo and/ or spaghetti and how some people had never heard of it. That developed out of necessity. When I was growing up, if there were boiled eggs in the pot, that meant that Mama didn't have enough meat to feed us. Eggs were cheap, plentiful and filling. Adding them in a dish was a way to fill our bellies.

Today folks generally have the available funds to buy what they want and they have access to a wide variety of foods. They can buy the ingredients and prepare dishes to their liking, which is generally somewhat dependent on what they grew up eating.

Preparing and enjoying foods, the way that you like, is exactly what you should do. Saying that the way someone else does it is wrong, because that's not the way it's done in your house, is silly.

Folks have been arguing over how to make gumbo and/ or jambalaya for years. There's never gonna be a winner.

Carry On!