Chowder & Gumbo: Kissing Cousins
by Joe George

When I find myself holding an oyster, I wonder who in the world first thought of eating this thing. Did they stub and cut their toe on it while wading knee-deep and get so mad that they decided to eat it as the ultimate act of revenge, or were they so hungry they smashed it open on a rock and sucked it down? The same is true with recipes. I really believe, for example, that the first cook who whisked oil into egg yolks, creating mayonnaise, was a genius.

Two recipes that have often held my attention are chowder and gumbo, which I’ve come to think of as culinary first cousins. Gumbo is the younger of the two, but both stem from the same family tree. These two recipes are, in essence, the story of the people who originally made them. And in the same way that someone may start a family tree at the present and work backwards, that’s sometimes the logical way to do culinary research.

Chaudrée de Pommes de Terre (Potato Chowder)

Yield: 3 quarts

3 tablespoons unsalted butter
12 ounces diced ham
1 cup diced onion
1/2 cup diced carrots
1/2 cup diced celery
2 teaspoons minced garlic
2-1/2 pounds peeled and diced potatoes
6 cups chicken broth
1 teaspoon thyme
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 cup milk

Heat the butter in a heavy soup pot over medium-high heat. When it begins to bubble add the ham, onions, carrots, celery, and garlic. Sauté the vegetables and ham for a few minutes. Stir in the potatoes, broth, thyme, salt, and black pepper. Bring to a boil then lower to a low simmer. Simmer for about an hour, stirring often. Using a wire whisk, gently break apart some of the potatoes to thicken the soup. Add the milk just before serving.

New England Clam Chowder

Yield: 4 quarts

2 dozen chowder clams (quahogs)
2 quarts water or chicken broth
1/4 cup diced salt pork
1 cup diced onion
1/2 cup diced celery
1/2 cup diced carrots
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup diced potato
1 teaspoon fresh thyme
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 quart milk

Place the clams in a pot with the water or broth. Cover and steam them for about 10 minutes, or until they’re cooked and open. Strain the broth and reserve it; remove the clams from their shells and chop the clams, then set aside.

In a heavy soup pot over medium heat, sauté the salt pork until it’s golden brown. Add the onion, celery, and carrot; sauté another two minutes. Stir in the flour, lower the heat and cook for a few minutes, stirring often. Add the potato, thyme, salt, and pepper. Add the clam broth and stir to avoid any lumps. Bring the soup to a boil and add the chopped clams. Lower the heat and simmer the chowder for 15 minutes. Stir in the milk just before serving.

Shrimp, Sausage, and Okra Gumbo

Yield: 3 quarts

1/2 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 medium onion, diced
1 small green pepper, diced
3 stalks celery, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
8 ounces smoked sausage, split lengthwise and sliced
12 okra pods, sliced 1/2 inch thick
1-1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
6 cups chicken broth
1 pound medium shrimp, peeled and de-veined
1/2 cup rice

Make a roux by heating the oil in a heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat and stirring in the flour with a wooden spoon. Stir the roux continuously for 5-10 minutes, or until the roux is brown and smells of toasted nuts. Add the diced onion, green pepper and celery, stir it into the roux and cook it for 3 minutes. Add the garlic, sausage and okra, stir it into the roux and cook it for an additional 3 or 4 minutes. Stir in the salt, thyme, pepper and chicken broth. Bring to a boil and stir to remove any lumps. Lower to a simmer and cook for 20 minutes. Add the shrimp and simmer another 10 minutes. While the gumbo is simmering, boil the rice in salted water. Stir the rice into the gumbo before serving.

Today the cooking terms Cajun and créole are often interchanged, but there was a time when they were quite distinct. Cajuns are the descendants of French Acadians who fled Nova Scotia in the 1780s.

They migrated, directly or indirectly, to what was then called New France, which later became southern Louisiana. Cajun is derived from the transmutation of the word Acadian, referring to the easternmost part of Canada (and at one time a portion the most northeastern part of the United States). Créoles, on the other hand, were often American or Caribbean by birth with French or Spanish heritage. During the early 1800s Spain ruled Louisiana and named all people that were American-born but had direct European lineage criollo, later to be translated to the French as créole. Créoles were the wealthier city folks and their cuisine reflected this: It was more refined and used more cream and butter; it was directly influenced by the classic cuisines of Europe. Creole food was (and is) more “French,” while Cajun food is more a product of Louisiana, its climate, and what bounty it had to offer.

Cajun food is spicier than créole, and incorporates more pork products and indigenous seafood. Both cuisines were influenced by slaves (American-born and newly arrived from Africa and the Caribbean) and also by the local Choctaw Indians.

The word gumbo comes from the West African gombo or kin-gombo, meaning okra, which is an ingredient in many recipes. It was also was once used for non-food descriptions as well, such as the Cajun phrase gumbo ya-ya, meaning when everybody is talking all at once, in the same way a gumbo pot may have many ingredients and flavors at once. And in days gone by the rural Cajun patois was also called gumbo.

Roy F. Guste Jr., fifth-generation proprietor of Antoine’s Restaurant in New Orleans, claims in his book, The 100 Greatest Dishes of Louisiana Cookery, that gumbo is the single most important dish in all of Louisiana cookery, and that anyone wanting to develop a repertoire of this cuisine should learn gumbo first. The late New Orleans chef and poet Howard Mitcham, in his book, Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz, states that there are no two gumbos alike, not even when made by the same cook.

He also likes to equate making gumbo to playing in a jazz band: “it’s an improvisational thing.” I also read a quote from a cook referring to the ingredients he needed for gumbo, and he stated that he could make gumbo from anything, that it didn’t matter whether it flew in the sky, walked on two legs or four, or even creeped and crawled on the ground. I suppose this could be said about many one-pot meals, but with gumbo (and chowder) it seems especially true.

Now let’s look a generation or two prior, before the migration south. Like gumbo, chowder is a product of the people, but more so it’s a product of what they had to cook. In Louisiana, where tomatoes, crawfish, chicken, rice, chilies, and spicy andouille sausage were plentiful, this is what they used. But in the far north there was milk, salted pork, potatoes, and plenty of fish. (The original chowders were fish; clams came later.)

The English word chowder is derived from the French chaudière: the pot in which chaudrée is cooked. The root word from which these are based is chaud, French for hot; chaudière translates literally to cooker or heater. The etymology can be taken one step further to the Latin word, calderia, which loosely means “a warming place” or “a place to keep things warm;” it’s also where we get the word cauldron.

If we look maybe just one generation earlier we can see that the chaudrée of Northwest France is a sort of fisherman’s stew, which consists of local seafood simmered in broth along with vegetables and herbs, which is really what both chowder and gumbo are: humble stews using ingredients at hand.

A listing in the French cookery encyclopedia, Larousse Gastronomique, translates chaudrée simply as “fish soup.” It goes on to state the various seafoods that can be included in the dish, including eel. A 1970 edition of the bilingual book, Food À La Canadienne, lists two recipes for chaudrée—one is based on fish and the other on potato. When some of the French-speaking Acadians migrated southward, into New England, the language was English and chaudière began to be pronounced as chowder.

Clams were added to the pot because of their regional abundance, but it wasn’t until the early 1900s that a restaurateur at Coney Island replaced the milk with tomatoes to create Manhattan clam chowder (which, I suppose, could be considered the eccentric cousin who moved to the big city).

What it really boils down to (pun intended) is that both chowder and gumbo began as true meal-in-a-bowl recipes. When the people moved, so did the recipe. Their geographic climate changed, so it was only natural that some of the ingredients and flavorings changed along with it, but the original premise of the recipes remain the same. They were delicious recipes that could be made in a single pot, and were hearty enough to fill up a working-person’s belly.

http://artvoice.com/issues/v7n44/chowder_and_gumbo