Part 2 of 4: The Moreland gumbo and a garden at the end of its season
Bessie M. Gant published this gumbo in mid-September 1943. A recipe calling for two pounds of okra, three large tomatoes, a green pepper, and two onions is a photograph of a garden in its last productive month.1Okra traveled from West Africa with captives who planted it in their provision grounds and the word gumbo descends from Bantu terms for the plant.2 Gant’s recipe skips the flour-based roux of French Louisiana cooking and finishes the pot with two tablespoons of filé, the ground sassafras leaf that Choctaw people prepared and sold in Louisiana markets. Cooks of African descent learned from Native neighbors as much as from Europeans, and in the early centuries that exchange shaped the table more than anything imported from Britain or France.3
By 1943, families had planted roughly twenty million victory gardens, which produced a striking share of the nation’s fresh vegetables while commercial crops went to the armed forces. A gumbo built from okra, tomatoes, peppers, and onions cost a cook her labor rather than her ration stamps. The shrimp is the shrewdest choice in the recipe. Beef and pork required red stamps from a ration book by the spring of 1943, but fish and shellfish stayed off the ration lists. A pound of shrimp boiled in the shell gave a family the protein and the celebration of a Sunday dinner without spending points they needed for the rest of the month.4
Arjun Appadurai’s idea of gastro-politics asks who holds power over what a person grows, cooks, and eats. A cook who raises the vegetables, buys an unrationed protein, and thickens the pot with a Native American seasoning sold in their own market has answered that question in her own favor. Gant handed readers a dinner that depended as little as possible on anybody else’s permission.5
Which parts of your own best meals could you grow, catch, or trade for, and which parts require someone else’s approval?
[Side Bar]
Hazel Henry Moreland supplied this gumbo to Bessie M. Gant for her Pittsburgh Courier column of September 18, 1943, where it ran first among her husband’s favorite dishes. The filé that finishes the pot came from the Choctaw of Louisiana, the home state of the comedian Mantan Moreland. Published at the close of okra season during the second full year of wartime rationing, it is a garden dish built around an unrationed protein. Source: Pittsburgh Courier, September 18, 1943, 11.
Moreland Gumbo
Ingredients
2 pounds okra
1 green pepper
2 large onions
3 large tomatoes
1 pound fresh shrimp
2 tablespoons filé powder
Salt, pepper, and bacon drippings
Directions
Cut the okra, onions, green pepper, and tomatoes fine. Put them in a saucepan and add salt, pepper, and bacon drippings. Cook 15 minutes, until tender. Boil the shrimp in the shell until tender. Peel them and place them in the pan with the other ingredients, then boil for 5 minutes. Thicken with the filé powder. Remove from the heat and serve with dry rice.
Notes
1. Bessie M. Gant, “Bess’ Secrets: ’Bout Good Things to Eat—Mantan Moreland Does His Share to Keep Up Morale of Service Men,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 18, 1943, 11.
2. Frederick Douglass Opie, “Influence, Sources, and African Diaspora Foodways” Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010)
3. Opie, “Influence, Sources, and African Diaspora Foodways,” [page numbers to confirm]; [citation to add on Choctaw production and sale of filé in Louisiana markets].
4. Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998)
5. Arjun Appadurai, “Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia,” American Ethnologist 8, no. 3 (August 1981): 496–497.