Creole Sketches/Attention! Azim!
ATTENTION! AZIM![1]
Editor City Item — Your columns contained a few days ago a recipe for gombo which contained neither okra filé nor fine herbs. Please give one from a genuine Creole cook, omitting nothing of the delicious compound so dear to Crescent City gourmands, and made in perfection nowhere else.
We have just been to see a "genuine Creole cook" and one of the best in the city, who gives us the following receipts:
GOMBO FÉVI
A whole chicken — if chicken cannot be had, veal will serve instead; a little ham; crabs, or shrimps, or both, according to the taste of the consumer; okra according to the quantity of soup needed; onions, garlic, parsley, red pepper, etc. Thicken with plenty of rice. The gombo févi is made with green and fresh gombo or okra cut up. It would be no use to attempt to lay down rules in regard to the proportion in which the above ingredients are to be used, as there are not, perhaps, two Creole cooks who follow the same recipe exactly. Everything depends on taste and experience.
GOMBO FILÉ
This is made exactly like the other, but with pulverized okra instead of fresh green okra, and oysters are also used, in proportion to the quantity of soup needed. If Azim needs further information, he must inform us, and we shall send him to a first-class Creole cook, with whom he can converse at leisure.
We fear that the good old Creole lore is rapidly disappearing, not merely in regard to cooking, but also in regard to natural medicine. The herb medicines of the old Creole nurses were matchless; and doctors were seldom called into Creole homes in the old days except in desperate cases. There were family secrets in regard to tisanes and cataplasms and purgatifs which boasted a San Domingo or a Martinique origin, and which many good old black women averred had come from Africa in the first years of American slavery — the only heirlooms which aged obi-men could bequeath to their slave children. Many of these secrets are kept with something of religious awe. Neither love nor money nor menaces could extort them from the owners. If childless, it is more than likely the secret will die with their owners; if they have children, these generally inherit the mystical power, but hardly ever do they seem in this generation to obtain the success of their fathers and mothers. We have often suggested that all the extant knowledge in regard to Creole cookery and herb medicine, so far as it is possible to obtain it, should be collected and published. Such a publication would not only be a literary curiosity, but also a work of rare practical value, and we sincerely believe the editor of such a work might find the investment a paying one. It would be hopeless to attempt a complete work of such a description, for reasons which we have often given; but here remains a great deal which can be obtained and which is of great value. With time and leisure we should wish for no better or more agreeable employment than the collection and arrangement of such curiosities.
- ↑ Item, July 8, 1880.