Gumbo-aux-Herbes

Lagos, Nigeria

3 July, 2014

"Jambalaya, crawfish pie, and filé gumbo...!" - a Hank Williams song

Today I ate in a restaurant in Lagos. Being adventurous I once again opted to try one of the Nigerian entrées, instead of pasta or sushi. What I had was a typical Nigerian dish called UGU. When they brought it out, it looked very familiar. Although the condiments were somewhat different, it not only looked but tasted like something I ate occasionally way back in my younger days in New Orleans. 

On the menu, the ugu was called a soup, but it was rather dry and had a somewhat grassy taste. That is because it essentially is a grass soup. Although the Nigerians refer to it as a soup, it is by no means the thin, watery, broth or thicker vélouté we are accustomed to in the West. 

As in New Orleans creole dishes and in Cuban cuisine, meat here is used as a seasoning, and tends to be a side dish, rather than the main item. Nigerians in general are very much meat-eaters, but because of spoilage, and especially because of the high cost of meat, poorer villagers often heave trouble making ends meat - so they have to make one of them vegetable! We did the same in Louisiana.

When I was a small child, I remember walking around the corner to my great-grandmother's. A very old lady who only spoke French, Granmère Victorine once had a tiny vegetable farm downriver from New Orleans. She would go out into her side and back yards, and collect a variety of what appeared to be merely weeds. She then washed them well and prepared a dish that to my young ears sounded like "gumbozaire." 

Years later, after much study of the French language, I was able to figure out what that word really was: it was "gumbo-aux-herbes," literally grass gumbo!It finally made sense to me: In Louisiana, the word gumbo means a very thick soup, more like a stew than a soup. So grass gumbo was a very thick "weed" soup, made from wild plants, such as polkweed, spinach, turnip & collard greens, etc. plus a dash of sassafras (a legacy of our Native Americans - renamed "filé" by the French) and other ingredients, such as ham or pickle pork. 

There is another interesting ingredient here: gumbo-aux-herbes, the way my great-grandmother prepared it, had NIGHTSHADE in it. Nightshade is a poison, but doesn't have to be poisonous if done correctly. 

(The very word gumbo is of west African origin, "kingombó" or "kinbombó" and originally meant okra, a prime ingredient in the original Louisiana gumbo. "Gumbo" later began to be used as a synonym for soup - usually thick and stew-like.) 

As I savored this dish, I remembered those days as a little boy, hearing my great-grandmother tell me in French that she was going to fix me gumbozaire. Who would have thought I'd relive a childhood memory in Africa?? When I was a kid growing up in New Orleans, I could clearly see many of the African influences in our culture, but back then that sort of observation was generally frowned upon by many. 

In today's multicultural New Orleans, we are very proud of, and emphasize elements of, French culture, and well we should! But we now also recognize, celebrate, and EMBRACE that rainbow of other lands, peoples, and cultures that have put ingredients into the huge pot of gumbo that is, and has always been NEW ORLEANS!