Heartache Gumbo

Gumbo is sacred. It is the stew-soup of the south. Outside of being a regional delicacy, southerners tend to guard the process as a ritual; something "foreigners" to the southern states shouldn't bother to try and reproduce. For a long time, I felt this way about gumbo, but couldn't explain why.

When I was young, gumbo day was something like a holiday. It usually happened in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, using the Thanksgiving fried turkey carcass as a base for the stock. If any of us kids had any plans that night, they were cancelled as soon as the news spread. On more than one occasion, my friends actually cancelled entire social events to come to my parents' house and eat gumbo.

Yes, it was delicious, but that's only half the reason it was so important. My friends loved gumbo day because so few of their families sat down to eat together. Of course, when you're a teenager, sitting down to dinner with your family is a bother, because you have so many other important things to do. So none of my friends minded not eating with their families, until they sat down at our dining table. It's something you don't realize you want until it's right there, and you've been without it for years.

When I finally (yes finally) moved out of my parents' house, I had a lot of trouble making my apartment feel like home. I know everyone has trouble with that, but my family was so... rich in informal tradition that I really noticed when it was gone. It was like an un-nameable void in my soul, and I unconsciously bought things for my kitchen when the void took over. I thought it was just a compulsion to take my mind off things, but what I was really doing was creating a home, in exactly the fashion my parents had instilled in me when I was a toddler. Stocking my kitchen was the only thing I knew how to do, to recreate the smells and warmth of my childhood.

I lived here for years before I got the nerve to make a gumbo of my own. My father fried three turkeys for Thanksgiving, specifically so we could bring them home and make our own gumbo day. I was nervous, especially about the roux part--they're so easy to mess up, and if it burns, you just have to throw it out and start over.

I always heard that gumbo takes an entire day, sometimes two, to make. And it can, but my first one didn't take all day-- but it came out all wrong. Not in flavor or texture, but in feeling. The reason gumbo takes a whole day to make is because everything in your living space has to be spotless before you begin to chop. Why? Because when you're done cooking, you try to sit down on your couch full of laundry and put your bowl on the cluttered coffee table, and you can't enjoy it. It's downright unpleasant. You sit there and wonder why the smell alone isn't enough to make this place feel like home, and it's because everything is a mess. You get angry, like I did. Add to that the amazing amount of dishes and large stock pots in the sink, and you've got an erupting volcano of rage.

So when you've got a gumbo itch, no matter how late in the day it is, throw your stock on the stove and clean the shit out of everything in your life that could use it. Think about things you regret, ball them up and throw them into the stock pot--sadness and heartache are the unnamed spices in a great gumbo. And when you start cooking, there's no time to think about the bad, messy, or regretted things in your life--the roux is like a baby, you cannot leave it alone, and you have to put every ounce of attention on it for it to happen right. If your base is not done correctly, you might as well throw out the entire pot.

There's no time to think about the reason you wanted to make a gumbo in the first place. It might be because your life needs a hard day's work. Or, like me, because you're homesick--not for the place, but for that feeling: a mixture of aromas, a few people you want to feed, and everything in its place, inside and out.

When it's done, your apartment is still spotless, and you can take a break to cry if you want to, because it's hard to build a gumbo or a life. If you do this enough, eventually you won't have to measure anything anymore; it'll be a feeling, not a tablespoon. You'll somehow have everything you need to make it right when you need to; no running to the store or running out of time.

And you'll never burn a roux again, because you'll know how to make it without knowing exactly how to make it. At some point, you realize that no one does.