re: No Roux Gumbo (aka Chauvin-Style) w/Pics

Looks a damn good gumbo and probably not too expensive altogether.

You do know that's Jambalaya sans the rice?

you made chicken stew
looks great, I would definitely eat that

I think it's fascinating how dishes change from area to area
in my house, a stewed chicken had a roux, but chicken stew was exactly what you made there...a chunky chicken soup.

next we need to compare Sunday gravy!

Nice soup baw

I teredtig take, but I'm definitely more a of roux guy

Looks delicious although different from what I usually think of gumbo. Really like that hyper-regional types of food like this still exist.

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A "no roux" gumbo is about as legit as a "no tomato" marinara sauce.

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According to whom?

I can introduce you to a slew of actual Cajuns--people who still speak French, whose ancestry is directly traceable to the displaced Acadian settlers of LA, who still live in the same general area colonized by their Acadian immigrant ancestors--who will agree that a gumbo doesn't technically need a roux.

The popular concepts regarding LA food aren't necessarily the same thing as the lived, traditional practices of its people.

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How much is a "slew"? Was gumbo made without a roux by most of the early acadians?

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Tens of thousands, at least. It's a common enough concept in the Houma/Thib/south Lafourche area, home to an aggregate population of around 200K ppl.

The early Acadians didn't know a damn thing about gumbo when they landed in LA. The word itself, which referenced okra pods, is Bantu & first used (in Western sources) in print around 1805. In LA colonial times, flour was an expensive import, especially for rural/farming people who lived away from big port cities--and who lived in close proximity with native peoples as well as enslaved Africans. A close reading of early LA recipes/cookbooks referencing gumbo will turn up loads without a roux, as well as plenty of dishes that a modern eater might not consider a "real" gumbo.

Food rarely stays the same for very long, like so many aspects of culture, and it is very limiting to think of dishes as a fixed, prescribed entities. LA cooking, and Cajun cooking especially, is not a canonical construct (unlike, say, Careme's codification of French haute cuisine, which was upheld by Escoffier). Virtually everthing in traditional LA cooking is a borrowed mash-up of other people's ideas & traditions.

A key to Cajun cultural persistence is its absorptive nature--we borrow happily from whoever lives next door & give it our own seasoning. We don't bother wondering if something is Cajun or not--it IS cajun because we make it so in the doing. To wit, Cajun eggrolls...boudin burritos....king cakes (which weren't widely sold outside of NOLA when I was a kid in the 1970s), king cakes stuffed w/boudin...gumbo made with whatever floats, flies, swims, or scratches in the backyard, including hot dogs, spam, boiled eggs, and chicken feet...

Authenticity is a meaningless concept in the food world.