Shrimp, gombos, and Louisiana gumbo

In French — mostly African French, but also in France when necessary — okra are called gombos. You can't find them everywhere, that's for sure. The best source we've found so far is a little Asian grocery store up in Blois, nearly an hour's drive from Saint-Aignan. We were up there last Thursday.

I bought a kilo of fresh okra. The woman at the cash register of the little shop was surprised that I was buying a product that, she said, is mostly bought by her African customers. I explained that okra was very popular in the southern U.S., among black and white people alike. And then I started thinking about what I would do with such a lot of fresh okra.

Louisiana gumbo with rice and grilled shrimp

Gumbo, I thought — I haven't made that in years. The extra okra I would blanch and freeze for later. Making gumbo meant we needed some celery and green peppers, so Walt went to the market Saturday morning. Onions, green pepper, and celery are the usual aromatic vegetables used in Louisiana dishes like gumbo and jambalaya.

Blanched (parboiled) okra pods

The first step in making a thick, rich, soupy gumbo is to make a roux. Not a French-style roux of butter and flour that you turn into a white sauce or béchamel, but a brown roux. What you do is heat up about half a cup of vegetable oil in a pan and the sprinkle in about half a cup of flour. You stir that well and let that cook on medium heat for 30 minutes, more or less, until the flour turns a nice medium brown color, without letting it scorch.

A brown roux with onions, celery, green pepper,
herbs, and lardons cooking in it

The brown roux is both a thickening and a flavor ingredient. While it's cooking, chop up a large onion, a green bell pepper, and two or three stalks of celery. Add them to the brown roux and let it all cook together for another 45 minutes to an hour. Season with salt and pepper, and add some dried herbs — thyme, rosemary, and a couple of bay leaves, for example. Optionally, toss in a cup of lardons or diced ham too.

Add the parboiled okra pods to the vegetable-roux mixture

The next step is to add okra. Whether frozen or fresh, the okra needs to be cooked briefly in a little water or sautéed in oil before it goes into the roux mixture. Okra, whether added whole or sliced, will thicken the sauce. Add a chopped fresh tomato too, for flavor and color.

The finished gumbo after long, slow cooking

Once all the vegetables and seasonings are in and cooking, add liquid. If you're making shrimp gumbo, use shrimp broth that you make by boiling the shrimp shells in water for a few minutes. Or use chicken or vegetable broth, or even just water. You need about a liter (a quart) of liquid to make this much gumbo.

Grilled spicy shrimp

Now it just simmers for an hour or two. It will slowly thicken as it reduces. Everything is already cooked. Toward the end of the cooking time, when you think the gumbo is about ready, add some shrimp or some cooked chicken or sausage to the pan. Raw shrimp will cook quickly, say in 4 or 5 minutes. Or you can cook the shrimp separately like we did — on skewers on the grill. Any other meat you add to the gumbo should already be cooked so it just needs to heat through.

Grilled shrimp, yellow rice, and Louisiana gumbo – with gombos

The only other step is to cook some rice or grits/polenta to eat with the thick, rich gumbo. Enjoy. And don't forget the Tabasco or other hot sauce at the table.

Louisiana gumbo with shrimp

Louisiana cooking is based on three main flavoring ingredients that they call "the holy trinity" or something like that: onions, celery, and green bell peppers. Along with a roux and some meat, that's the basis for what is called a gumbo. Why gumbo? I'm not sure, but in French — and French is one of the three or four languages that are or used to be spoken in Louisiana — gombo is the name for the vegetable we call okra. Gombo is an African term. Okra can serve as a thickener in stews and soups. Plus, it tastes good.

Yesterday I made a gumbo. It was Walt's idea. We had the vegetables except the okra, a couple of pieces of chicken, and a bag of frozen shrimp, so the ingredients were in the kitchen. We also have plenty of hot red pepper powder and flakes, along with some Louisiana hot sauce that I brought back from the States recently. The ingredients in the hot sauce are not numerous or complicated: hot red pepper, vinegar, and salt.

The first step in making a gumbo is to make the roux (especially if you don't have any okra). It's simple: put 4 or 6 fluid ounces of vegetable oil or melted butter in a big pot. Add an equal amount of flour and whisk it into the oil to make a smooth paste. Cook that paste until the flour turns brown. You can cook it in a medium oven for a long time or you can just cook it (in less time) on top of the stove. Keep an eye on it and don't let it get too dark. The color of peanut butter is what I aim for. A roux, which is also the basis for white sauces like béchamel in France, can be white, red, brown, or black in Louisiana.

While the roux is cooking, dice up the vegetables. Most gumbos have some tomato in them. I decided to use oven-dried tomatoes from this past summer's garden in mine, but if I'd had fresh tomatoes or even tomatoes out of a can, that would have been good too. Another essential ingredient is chopped garlic — say 5 or 6 good-sized cloves. (Not shown in the photo above are the bell peppers — I used frozen ones from Picard.)

Since I didn't have any smoked sausage, which is another Louisiana ingredient — they call it andouille down there, but it's a smoked pork sausage and doesn't resemble French andouille (made with pork intestines) at all — I decided I could use some lardons fumés to give the gumbo a slightly smoky taste. I sauteed the lardons (bacon) first, actually, and used the fat they released as part of the fat to make the roux (for more flavor). I also put a couple of chicken thighs into the pot to brown along with the bacon.

Another flavor ingredient in the gumbo, which is a stew, is broth. In this case, I peeled the 3½ dozen shrimp I had and boiled the shells (not the shrimp themselves!) in a light chicken broth with bay leaves, hot red pepper flakes, black peppercorns, and allspice berries. That cooked while the roux was turning brown.

The next step is to toss all the chopped up vegetables, including the dried tomatoes if that's what you're using, into the hot roux, along with the lardons, and stir all that together over high heat until the vegetables start to look cooked. At that point, add a couple of quarts (liters) of broth to the stock. In other words, strain the shrimp broth into the roux and vegetables (and then discard the shrimp shells, bay leaves, and spices). The roux will thicken the broth nicely. Add as much water as you want to get the desired thickness and consistency. Don't forget to add salt and even some herbs like oregano or thyme.

Voilà ! Let the vegetables cook in the stew for about half an hour. Add the browned chicken thighs (as many as you want, really) at that point, and let them cook in the stew for another 15 or 20 minutes. Then turn the heat down to low, or even completely off, and toss the shrimp (peeled and deveined) into the pot. Let the stew sit for another 10 minutes and the shrimp will be cooked just right. Serve the gumbo with steamed or boiled rice. Don't forget the hot sauce (Tabasco, Texas Pete, Piri-Piri, or whatever you've got).

P.S. I forgot to mention that since I didn't have any okra, I added some green beans to the gumbo — those big wide, flat Romano (Italian) green beans. I put them in the gumbo when I put the chicken in.

Okra gumbo with shrimp and sausages

 

I bought a lot of fresh okra and three big bags of frozen shrimp this summer when we went to the Asian foods market up in Blois. Louisiana gumbo came to mind. I finally got around to making it over the weekend. I used okra that I blanched and stored in the freezer. I peeled and deveined the shrimp.

I found a recipe on the Epicurious web site that I liked because it didn't call for pounds and pounds of shrimp and sausages. It didn't make gallons and gallons of gumbo, which is a spicy soup or stew served with steamed rice. We had some riz complet de Camargue brown rice that we thought would be good with it, and it was.

In the freezer, I also found a liter of turkey broth, left over from poaching a turkey last Christmas. Perfect. We have plenty of Louisiana hot sauce that I've brought back from the U.S. on recent trips. We also have hot peppers — habenero, serrano, and cayenne — that we grew last summer and dried in the dehydrator.

The base of Louisiana gumbo is a roux — flour cooked in vegetable oil — which you can make as light or dark as you want. I made a fairly dark brown roux for this one. The flavor base is the what they call "the trinity" in Creole and Cajun cooking — onion, bell peppers, and celery (céleri-branches) diced up and cooked first in the roux and then in the stew.

Of course, I had to substitute locally available ingredients for the authentic Louisiana ingredients, but that's okay. For example, I couldn't get what they call "andouille" smoked sausages here in Saint-Aignan — French andouille is another thing entirely —  but I could get both plain saucisses de Toulouse and smoked saucisses de Montbéliard.

Okra and tomatoes

Okra are called gombos in French. It's an African word. That's where we get the term "gumbo" as in the Louisiana specialty dish. Okra is an ingredient — a green vegetable — that also acts as a thickener in the chicken, sausage, or seafood stew that is gumbo, as well as adding good taste.

In other places in the U.S. South, people like okra just cooked with tomatoes. The flavors of these two vegetables complement each other, and while the okra helps thicken the stewed tomatoes, the acidic nature of the tomato juice improves the texture of the okra. Add onions, garlic, herbs, and maybe some bacon, and you have a great vegetable dish. It's good served with grains like rice, couscous, polenta, or millet.

I can't find, or never have found, fresh or frozen okra in the supermarkets or open-air markets in Saint-Aignan. But there are two stores up in Blois, which has a significant population of fairly recent immigrants from places including Africa and India, that normally have some in their produce departments. Once I even found frozen okra, which is almost always available in supermarkets in the U.S. South. I was surprised the one time I found frozen okra in France, in an Asian supermarket.

When I can buy fresh okra, several times a year, I usually freeze a good supply of it for future meals. First you have to blanch it in boiling water, as you do with nearly all vegetables you want to store in the freezer. You can trim up the okra pods and then cut them into bite-size pieces before putting them in the freezer if you want to. The ones pictured on the left are some I blanched and froze this summer.

I prefer to leave the pods whole, though. I just cut off the top of the stem end of each pod, and then freeze them on trays so that they are separate and remain that way after freezing. The you can pack them in plastic bags and take out just the quantity you need or want when you decide to cook some, without having to thaw a large quantity.

That's what I did the other day. I took a dozen or so okra pods out of the freezer. I sauteed a few cut-up tomatoes from the garden and sauteed them with some onion in olive oil. Then I added some fresh tomato sauce and the frozen okra pods, which were basically cooked before freezing, and let all that simmer on the stove for a few minutes. Meanwhile, we cooked up a batch of millet (also available in the stores in Blois) and grilled a couple of pork chops for lunch. If I can do it, you can do it.

Rainy day activities

What do you do indoors when it rains more or less steadily for a week? Well, you have to entertain yourself, and try to be productive. Computers are good for entertainment, but a lot of them time you spend surfing or searching doesn't really pay off.

Fresh okra pods

Luckily, on one of the recent less rainy days, we drove up to Blois for lunch and to do some shopping. I bought a lot of vegetables: bell peppers of different colors, Italian flat green beans, sweet potatoes, and okra. Okra goes by the name gombo in French, and that's where we get the Louisiana dish called gumbo. It's a seafood stew that is thickened in part by cooked okra. Okra is also good cooked in a rice pilaf, or in Brunswick stew, and many other ways. See these old blog posts of mine.

Stem ends trimmed

Since I bought about three pounds of fresh okra, I had to figure out a way to process it for cooking over the next few weeks and months. You can make pickled okra, or you can freeze the okra pods. I decided on freezing, because our big chest freezer isn't at all full right now. If I could buy fresh or frozen okra in our local Saint-Aignan supermarkets, or at  the weekly outdoor markets around here, I probably wouldn't go to all this trouble. But I can't, so I do.

Blanching in boiling water

The key to freezing vegetables like okra, green beans, Brussels sprounts, and so many others is, of course, blanching them first in boiling water, and then freezing them on trays in the summer so that each pod or bean is frozen separately. That way, you can use as many as you want when you take them out of the freezer to cook them and not have to thaw out a big block of the vegetables that would be more than you need or want at that moment.

Taking a cold bath

Blanch the fresh okra pods for three to five minutes in boiling water, after trimming the stem end off each one. As soon as they're just slightly cooked, scoop them out of the boiling water with a slotted spoon (écumoire) and plunge them into a large quantity of cold water — ice water is good — to cool them down quickly. The photos here show the different stages in the process.

Arranged on trays for the freezer

Arrange the blanched okra pods (or beans or sprouts) on trays that will fit inside your freezer. Try not to let them be in contact with each other. Putting them on a silicon pad or a sheet of parchment paper (papier de cuisson) is a good idea. Set the tray or trays in the freezer and leave them for as long as 24 hours.

Frozen and separate

Once the vegetable pieces are hard-frozen, you can put them in plastic bags or containers, sealed up tight, and store them in the freezer long-term. And you can take out just the quantity you need when you want to cook and eat some. Do the same thing with sliced and blanched bell peppers, zucchini — any vegetable, really. When we have big crops of vegetables from our garden, we often use this method to preserve them.

I found okra

Earlier this week, after dropping Walt off at the gare for his quick trip to Paris, I went shopping at the Paris Store market in Blois. Paris Store is a chain of grocery stores that carry a wide rangle of products imported from Asia.

I bought a load of rice noodles, mung-bean noodles, bottles of Thai fish sauce and black rice vinegar, bags of corn meal, dried shitake mushrooms, and pinto beans, and two kilos of frozen shrimp, among other delicacies. When I thought I had finished shopping, I pushed my cart to the single check-out stand in the store. I was just going to just stand and wait as the customer ahead of me paid for and packed up her groceries.

Gombos, or okra

But there was nobody in line behind me, so I thought I might as well take a quick look at the vegetables and spring rolls of all kinds in the freezer cases right behind me. That was when I discovered the okra. In French, okra are called gombos. These okra, imported from Thailand, are actually labeled « Gambo », but that's okay. They are okra. I picked up 2 kilos.

A slight labeling issue

When I was packing up my groceries, I told the clerk how happy I was to have found gombos. He looked at me and said, well, you asked me if I could get some, so I did. I thanked him.

Walt and I had made a Paris Store run back in January. That day, I asked the Paris Store employee whether he ever had okra available. He didn't seem to understand the word okra, so I said, you know, des gombos. He understood that. "I ordered some once, fresh okra, but it didn't sell," he told me. "I ended up having to throw it out. If you want some, I can get it for you, but you have to buy 10 kilos of it."

Ten kilos is 22 pounds. Now I wanted okra, but what would I do with 22 pounds of it? "You could blanch it and freeze it," the Paris Store guy said. I asked him whether he might be able to get frozen okra. He said he didn't know.

Shrimp and okra cooked in olive oil
with hot red pepper flakes and garlic

Well, he remembered and he did find frozen okra. I took 2 kilos of it off his hands. I think maybe you have to be a Southerner to appreciate what a find this was. Okra and tomatoes. Fried okra. And Louisiana gumbo!

Yesterday I made shrimp and okra with grits. It was something I had made when I was in North Carolina a couple of years ago, and I had been thinking about it ever since. Okay, I can hear some people already: Slime! Yuck! Actually, that is the essence of okra. I say: "Embrace the sliminess!" — but try not to get it all over your clothes.

Grits, shrimp, and gombos

This okra I bought was imported from Thailand, so it's not exactly ecologically correct in terms of its carbon footprint. In 2006, I found some fresh okra at the Tang Frères supermarket in Paris and made a great Okra Pilâu from one of my Southern cookbooks (here's a link to my blog topic about that).

The recipe for shrimp and okra with grits is pretty simple. Cook some okra in boiling water for 10 minutes. Cook some grits or polenta in a separate pot of water. Peel, devein, and sauté some shrimp in vegetable oil with sliced garlic and hot red pepper flakes. Add the okra to the pan with some butter or olive oil for flavor, and turn down the heat. After a few minutes, serve the shrimp and okra over the grits.

An unexpected okra treat

“Okra is an annual flowering hibiscus (Abelmoschus esculentus) native to Africa. Its flowers, whose bright yellow petals deepen to rich burgundy red at their base, are some of the loveliest of all the hibiscuses. Of course, okra isn't grown for its ornamental qualities, but for the mucilaginous seedpods that develop after the brilliant flower has faded.”

Okra, the seedpod of an annual hibiscus plant

That's how Damon Lee Fowler introduces the Southern U.S. specialty vegetable okra in his book Classical Southern Cooking. Okra (a collective noun) is actually a fruit (like the tomato) and is known by the plural count noun « gombos » in French, but is not much known in France at all. It's something we don't find here in Saint-Aignan — at least I never have.

Here's a close-up of the okra pods...

However, a friend of ours went to Blois the other day and went shopping in a grocery store called Grand Frais. It's a new shop and I haven't been there yet. What our friend found was a bin full of gombos — fresh okra. She was kind enough to buy about a pound of nice fresh okra pods for us and leave them by our front door later that afternoon.

She told me on the phone that evening that okra isn't something she and her husband eat, but she knew I did because she remembered reading about okra on this blog.

...and here's what the okra looks like when you slice them.

“We tend to think of this vegetable as peculiarly Southern and African-American,” Damon Fowler writes, “but it can be found in Central and South America wherever Africans were settled and is also known to the cooking of the Middle East.” Well known is the Louisiana seafood stew called “gumbo,” in which okra serves as a flavoring and natural thickening ingredient.

Sliced okra cooking with wedges of yellow tomatoes and
red tomato sauce, along with onions and garlic

I've blogged about okra before (2010 and 2009, for example), and pointed out that a woman I knew and went to university with in Paris back in the 1970s surprised me one day when she cooked what she called bamia or bamies — it was okra. And the woman who cooked them lived in the city of Thessaloniki in Greece when she wasn't studying French in Paris.

I may soon have to stop stating so categorically that okra is hard to come by in France. I haven't yet found it, fresh or frozen, in our Saint-Aignan SuperU or Noyers-sur-Cher Intermarché, however, or in the farmers' markets. It seems to be sold only in specialty stores, in the cities.

This is the stewed okra and tomatoes you end up with.

Okra is good pickled in vinegar; dredged in cornmeal and deep-fried; stewed and served with rice; or, my favorite way, cooked with tomato sauce and chunks of tomato and onions.

I made okra and tomatoes yesterday, using sliced onions, sliced garlic, a pinch of dried thyme, and a pinch of hot red pepper flakes. It needs lots of salt and pepper, of course, as well as the one ingredient that makes the dish very Southern (the U.S. South, I mean) and also typically French: fried smoked bacon or lardons fumés, along with some of their cooking fat.

And here's a close-up. The okra seeds are tender, not hard.

We'll eat the okra and tomatoes not with rice but pasta — linguine, specifically — and an escalope de dinde à la milanaise. That's a thin slice of turkey breast that is breaded — in my case, just dredged in cornmeal — and panned in butter. Turkey scallopini, I guess, is the term used in American English — we call so many foods by more or less Italian names.

The okra and tomatoes will make a good sauce for the pasta and for the turkey. “The pairing of these two vegetables has all the makings of a great love story...,” Damon Fowler writes. “What they do for each other must be tasted to be understood; tomatoes lend their sunny tartness while the okra, in turn, enrobes with its silken texture, blunting the [tomatoes’] acid bite...”

Here's the recipe from Fowler's Classical Southern Cooking book:


Notice that I didn't use the S-word even once in this post. Happy eating!

Okra: think “silky”

Okra (in French, gombos) is one of those vegetables like beets (betteraves) or Brussels sprouts (choux de Bruxelles) that really get people going. Writing about them is almost like accepting a dare. Admitting you like them is like admitting you are weird. Well, I love them all.

Sometimes I think my taste buds must not be very well developed, or very sensitive. At the same time, I really enjoy good food. Or at least what I consider to be good food. I especially like foods that are cooked slowly and carefully, so that they become moelleux, onctueux, confits. The cooking has to be done carefully, but thoroughly. That applies to vegetables, meats, and fruit.

Okra pods, blanched in salted water and then sliced

One thing you can say about okra is that it is onctueux. In the context of food, that means doux (tender), moelleux (rich but mellow), crémeux (creamy), and velouté (velvety).The problem is, most people get stuck on the idea of okra's sliminess. That means they aren't getting past a prejudice, and probably that they aren't preparing the food in a way that emphasizes its best qualities.

Also, okra smells and tastes good. Yesterday when I was cutting up frozen okra pods that I had blanched in salted water — I only wish I could find okra fresh here in Saint-Aignan, or grow it — I said to Walt that the aroma of it reminded me of fresh sweetcorn — a.k.a. Indian corn, maize, or maïs. I don't think he agreed, but still — there's something very herby about it, and slightly sweet.

The French name for okra is « gombo », which is derived from a Bantu word, from Angola in Africa. It of course also gave its name to the Louisiana Creole seafood and chicken stew called "gumbo," which is thickened by the thick, sticky liquid inside the okra that cooks in it. The term okra is also of African derivation, coming from languages spoken in Ivory Coast and Ghana.

This is the pan of okra and tomatoes I cooked yesterday. I added
an extra ingredient: some sliced and stir-fried chicken breast meat.

When I lived in Paris in 1975, a Greek friend cooked okra once. I was surprised to learn okra is appreciated in Greece and other eastern Mediterranean countries. My Greek friend called it bamies, which she pronounced as [BAH-myess] I believe. According to the article on gombo in French Wikipedia, okra enters into the preparation of numerous Creole, African, and Japanese dishes.

Tomatoes from the garden, cut into chunks
and cooked with onions in bacon grease

In the U.S., okra is a Southern specialty. It came to the South with African slaves and, according to one book I have, was "in use" in America by at least 1780. One Southern cookbook author says it's probably true that okra is an acquired taste, but, he says, "if so, I acquired mine at a very young age." Well, I think I did too.

The two ways to acquire a taste for okra is to have it either perfectly fried or stewed with onions and very flavorful tomatoes. Each method reduces the impression of sliminess that so many people find off-putting.

Adding blanched okra to the cooked onions and tomatoes

Frying okra involves rolling each piece in good cornmeal and dropping it in very hot oil to cook it until it is golden brown. Another Southern book I use says that when you fry okra that way, "something miraculous happens. Everything about the vegetable that is unattractive disappears," the author says, "and a crisp, crunchy, dainty, and delicious morsel takes its place." The same author cites the following anecdote that appeared in the Arkansas Gazette in 1979:

Northern people are funny about food. There is a documented case in a Little Rock household of a transplanted New Yorker who declined a serving of fried okra on the ground that he was a vegetarian. The man seemed to be under the impression that each segment was a tiny crustacean scraped from the bottom of an Arkansas River towboat. It should be noted, in fairness, however, that the chances of the man's partaking of this Southern delicacy could not have been helped by the sight of his host spitting into the grease to make sure it was hot enough.

I don't spit into my okra and tomatoes when I cook them together. It's a very simple recipe. Fry some bacon in a pan. Take the bacon out when it's crispy, and set it aside to cool. Save the bacon grease and cook a couple of sliced or chopped onions in it until they are soft and slightly browned. Chop up four fresh tomatoes and add them to the pan, with any juice they release in the chopping.

Bacon, chicken breast, okra, onions, and tomato
stewed briefly in tomato and okra "juices"

When the tomatoes have started cooking down, add about two cups of fresh okra, sliced into small pieces (see my pictures). Or use about a pound of frozen, sliced okra, which you can precook in salted boiling water if you want. Don't throw out the water the okra is cooked in — add it to the tomatoes. The okra water (a "silky" liquid, wink wink) will combine with the slightly acid and slightly sweet tomato liquid to make a nice velvety sauce.

Crumble the bacon or break it into pieces and add it to the pan. Cook the tomatoes and okra together on medium to medium-low heat until the sauce has reduced and thickened to your taste. Don't forget salt and pepper, and pinches of hot red pepper flakes, dried thyme, and ground cumin can add nice flavors too. Serve the stewed tomatoes and okra with cooked rice, millet, wheat berries, or pasta.

Here's one final quote. I took it from a web site on Texas cooking:

People try to be kind to okra by describing its texture as "silky," a euphemism, to be sure. There's no getting around it: okra, especially stewed okra is slimey. There should be another word that does it justice, but I'm afraid the English language is lacking. But I refuse to defend okra. It's delicious — so much so that I enjoy that slimey texture. There's an old one-liner about okra that goes like this: When I was a kid, I ate so much okra I couldn't keep my socks up.

Jambalaya, a Louisiana treat

Walt and I hade been talking about it for weeks. Jambalaya, I mean. We wanted a good way to enjoy some more of the shrimp (crevettes, prawns) that we bought at the Asia Market in Tours back in January. And maybe finish them. Jambalaya is a staple of Louisiana Creole and Cajun cooking. I decided to base my version on the late New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme's jambalaya — I have his book titled Chef PP's Louisiana kitchen.

Jambalaya is a rice dish that's usually made with a spicy Louisiana smoked pork called tasso; chunks of boneless chicken (breast or thigh meat); smoked Louisiana andouille; and shrimp, peeled and de-veined. It also includes a trio of aromatic diced vegetables called The Holy Trinity in Louisiana — onion, celery (céleri-branches), and sweet bell peppers (poivrons). Tomatoes and okra are frequent additions. And spices and herbs, including cayenne pepper, black pepper, bay leaves, thyme, sage, and oregano, are essential. Cajun and Creole recipes are Louisiana born but have French roots, Prudhomme writes in the book I mentioned above. Jambalaya might also remind you of Spanish paella.

The French Wikipédia article about jambalaya says the recipe might have its origins in Provence. The Cajuns are people who emigrated from France to eastern Canada and then were forced by the British to move on to Louisiana. They adapted old French recipes and traditional cooking methods to use North American ingredients. Now I'm adapting Cajun recipes to use French ingredients: smoked pork belly instead of tasso, for example, or other smoked sausages for andouille. Luckily, I can get everything else I need to make jambalaya, or the other Louisiana classic called gumbo, here in France — even okra nowadays. To make jambalaya, sauté the meats and vegetables with herbs and spices, add rice and broth, and bake the dish in the oven until the rice is cooked and the broth is absorbed. It's pretty simple, actually. And delicious.

I've been to Louisiana two or three times in my life. Once was back in the 1970s, when I drove down to New Orleans and Cajun country with a French woman I worked with at the University of Illinois. That was fun, because we spoke French together and when Louisianans heard us talking, they would often speak to us in French. If you go there speaking English, you might never hear Louisiana French. I went back to Louisiana in the 1990s and I made it a point to speak French with people, just to see if they would understand. Many did, but some just said they understood what I was saying but were apologetic for not being comfortable speaking French. For decades, schoolchildren in Louisiana were not allowed to speak French at school. Many never really learned the language, even though they heard their parents and grandparents speaking it at home.