‘I Will Play for Gumbo!’ Notes on the Super Bowl, and a Recipe

Today is the Super Bowl. I don’t have a dog in this year’s fight (at least not a two-legged one), as the Stillers–after a promising start to the season–folded, as they so often have in the past couple of decades, towards the end. Oh well.

And without Tom Brady (Boo!) and the New England Patriots (always worth rooting against–cheaters!) in the mix, I can’t gin up all that much interest, pro or con, in the game itself.

As for the sideshows, I am delighted that nubile girls in bikinis (together with the implication that there are places in the country where it’s warm enough to wear such garments, even this early in the Spring) are back in the ads. And that the league is at least beginning to purge meaningless virtue-signaling from the field. Poor Bud Light, though. Their ad is a pretty sad commentary on how far they’ve yet to go to find their way back to their base. Although, full points for the fact that the ad does seem to be full of people more closely resembling actual members of the male sex than the cringey last gasp of some Harris supporters.

Again, I note that things are improving, even if–in the case of Bud Light–in an abjectly self-conscious way.

Animals can’t by nature be self-conscious, though, and so I salute the reappearance, for the first time in ten years, of the Clydesdale foal. No doubt another attempt by Budweiser to rehabilitate the brand, but a much more charming one, nonetheless:

Now, moving on to the actual football:

Sheesh. Philadelphia. I’m still not quite over that Michael Vick thing. What dog lover would be? It’s an obstacle. (Don’t click on the link, or do further investigation, if you’re a dog lover. Just trust me.)

And yet.

The Kansas City coach? Andy Reid. (Wow, he must be 100 years old by now. Either that or he was about twelve when he started his coaching career.) Michael Vick’s former coach. He who promoted Vick to “starting quarterback” in 2010 or thereabouts. So each team is tainted, and I’ve got a bit of the same vibe going on as Henry Kissinger had about the Iran/Iraq war: “It’s a pity both sides can’t lose.”

I wonder if Patrick Mahomes is a dog lover? Or Jalen Hurts? Maybe I could break the tie that way?

Lord, I hope so. I know Travis Kelce’s girlfriend has that whole “childless cat lady” thing going for her; however, it sure would help if someone, on one or the other team, spoke up for the dogs. Odo and Xuxa both agree:

If push comes to shove, I guess I’ll hold my nose and root for Philly because 1) it’s in my state; 2) it’s the underdog (sorry to mention dogs again) and I’m a Brit, and that’s just what we do; and 3) I don’t want to see Kansas City win three in a row. So there it is.

But I digress. This post is also about gumbo!

I love gumbo, which Wikipedia defines as:

…a stew that is popular among the U.S. Gulf Coast community, the New Orleans stew variation being the official state cuisine of the U.S. state of Louisiana. Gumbo consists primarily of a strongly flavored stock, meat or shellfish (or sometimes both), a thickener, and the Creole “holy trinity”: celery, bell peppers, and onions.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on gumbo, but its recipes generally fall into one of two categories: Cajun or Creole, with a healthy smattering of African-American tradition mixed into both. There is a specific spice/herb blend for each variety, one you can either make yourself or buy pre-packaged at your supermarket or specialty store. Feisty arguments regularly ensue about what goes into a gumbo, whether one should ever include tomatoes (this seems to be a “pistols at dawn” level disagreement), whether the liquid should be thickened by okra, filé powder (finely ground sassafras leaves) or both, and how much seafood, if any, should be included.

I’ve tried several gumbo recipes over the years, and for this year’s New Orleans Super Bowl, I chose a new one. This one: Gumbo Recipe Inspired by a New Orleans Legend! It’s a Creole variant and includes a very nice recipe for making your own seasoning powder. I also liked the fact that it includes two kinds of sausage, as well as shrimp and chicken, and I appreciated the “bone-in” nature of the chicken pieces, as the bones give more flavoring to the liquid.

Once I got down into the nitty-gritty of the steps, though, I found the recipe a bit incoherent. There’s a lack of clarity about the two different measures of flour, and what you do with either or both of them, and at what point. A little further along in the recipe, it tells you to put the sausages into the stew twice, with a different cooking time for each one.

So here is my gently revised list of ingredients and set of steps, which I think preserve the delightful spirit of the original and which work even better to produce a lovely, bubbling stew. Can’t wait to try it, in a couple of hours!

INGREDIENTS

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 5 tablespoons Creole seasoning, homemade or purchased
• 1 chicken cut up into 10 pieces, 2 legs, 2 thighs, 2 wings, 2 breasts cut in half
• 1/4 cup bacon grease
• ½ cup unsalted butter, divided in two
• ¾ cup flour
• 1 large onion
• 1 green bell pepper
• 1 red bell pepper (this is optional, but I like some “red bits” in my stew)
• 6 stalks celery
• 4 cups chicken stock
• 4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper (optional)
• 1 dash Louisiana Hot Sauce (optional)
• 1 pound mixed smoked or cured sausages, such as Andouille and Kielbasa, sliced 1/4 inch thick
• 1 cup sliced okra; I use frozen (optional)
• 1 pound large shrimp (I buy a 1-pound bag of large, wild, frozen shrimp–shelled and deveined–and leave in the fridge overnight to thaw)
• 1 teaspoon gumbo file powder (ground sassafras leaves)
• 2 tablespoons chopped parsley

STEPS

1. Put the two cups of flour in a large bowl. Add three tablespoons of the Creole seasoning and mix well. Take your chicken pieces and dredge them well with flour, getting it into every crevice and flap that you can.
2. Put the 1/4 cup bacon grease and half the unsalted butter into a pan with a thick, wide base (about 12″ if you have one) and heat on medium until hot but not smoking. Add the chicken pieces. Lower the heat a bit if you need to, to make sure things don’t smoke or burn, and brown the chicken on all sides (you’ll need to move it around and turn it). If your pan base isn’t big enough to lay all the chicken pieces out in one layer, then just do it twice, with half the chicken each time.
3. Discard the leftover seasoned flour. It’s no good for anything as it’s been in contact with raw chicken. If you’re worried about waste, try using less for the dredging, but I found it doesn’t work very well if there isn’t a generous amount of flour to bury the chicken in.
4. When the chicken is browned nicely, remove it to a bowl and set aside. Mix the bits left in the pan with the butter and bacon grease, and scrape the pan well. Add the other 1/4 cup of butter.
5. Add the 3/4 cup of flour into the pan and mix to make a roux. You’re going to cook this on a low-medium heat for somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes, until it becomes a nice chocolaty-brown. I use a whisk with silicone-coated tines to keep things moving; if you let it sit more than a very few seconds, it may burn. Adjust the heat, and your stirring energy accordingly. You want it to be a thick, but not doughy, consistency. If it’s tending to “chocolate chip cookie dough,” add a little more butter to loosen it up and get it over into something more resembling “chocolate pudding.” Once it’s done, you can take it off the heat, although you may still need to stir for another minute or two if the pan is so hot that it’s still cooking. The aim is always to stop it from sticking and burning.
6. Cut the onions, peppers and celery into largish pieces and get out your food processor with the chopping blade. (You can cut them smaller by hand, but this is quicker). Whizz the onion (using the on-and-off “pulse”) until it’s in small bits (not a liquid; you need to be able to see the pieces). Dump into the roux. Repeat with the celery. Then the peppers. I tend to leave the peppers a bit larger, because I like to see the aforementioned “red bits.”
7. Once all your veg is in the roux, stir and return to the heat and cook for about three minutes, or until things have been on a gentle boil again for a couple of minutes.
8. Add the chicken stock, garlic, and cayenne (if using) and simmer for another five minutes.
9. Add the browned chicken and the remaining two tablespoons of Creole seasoning. Stir well and simmer for 20 minutes.
10. Add the sausage and the okra (if using), and continue simmering for five minutes.
11. Dump the defrosted shrimp out of the bag into a strainer, rinse, drain, and chuck them in the stew, along with the filé powder and the chopped parsley. Simmer for three minutes, or until the shrimp are pink and cooked through.
12. Serve with the rice of your choice.

NOTES

1. Both okra and filé powder are mucilaginous, and therefore will thicken whatever it is you add them to. You can use either or both in this recipe. If you don’t like okra, you might increase the quantity of filé powder to 2 teaspoons and leave the okra out. If you like okra, or you can’t get filé powder where you live, you can increase the amount of okra to two cups.
2. You can use any combination of smoked sausage as suits your fancy, or just stick with one kind. I like the Andouille/Kielbasa combination suggested in the original recipe because it combines the hotter Andouille with the very differently spiced Kielbasa.
3. If you don’t have any bacon grease, you can use 3/4 cup butter, or a combination of butter and oil for the fat. Bacon grease--which isn't included in the original recipe, but which I've used in other gumbo recipes--is a flavor-enhancer, though.
4. I use frozen shrimp because I’m on “the wrong side of the mountains” as they say, when it comes to trusting fresh seafood. By all means, use fresh if you’re lucky enough to live where it’s hauled in daily in front of your eyes. (High school and college summers in Prince Edward Island ruined me for life when it comes to what I consider “fresh” in the piscine department. I’d rather trust the flash-frozen on the boat variety where I live. I envy you, if you have other choices.)

Anyhoo, here’s the–absolutely top-notch– result:

Enjoy the football!

Here’s a musical interlude appropriate to the occasion:

Jimmy Buffett, R.I.P.

What are you eating today?