Gumbo z'herbes

As tradition built it

Gumbo z'herbes

Leah Chase's recipe, reprinted from Molly O'Neill's One Big Table

Ingredients

Greens

• 1 bunch mustard greens
• 1 bunch collard greens
• 1 bunch turnip greens
• 1 bunch watercress
• 1 bunch beet tops
• 1 bunch carrot tops
• 1 bunch spinach
• 1 bunch lettuce
• 1 head cabbage
• 2 medium onions, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, chopped

Meats

• 1 lb smoked sausage, cubed
• 1 lb smoked ham, cubed
• 1 lb brisket stew meat, cubed
• 1 lb boneless brisket, cubed
• 1 lb hot chaurice sausage, cubed

Roux, broth and seasoning

• 5 tbsp flour
• 2 cups reserved greens broth, for steaming the meats
• 2 quarts reserved greens broth, for the pot
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1 tbsp salt
• 1 tsp cayenne
• 1 tbsp filé powder
• to serve steamed rice, to serve

Method

1. Clean and boil the greens, mustard greens, collard greens, turnip greens, watercress, beet tops, carrot tops, spinach and lettuce, one bunch each, together with a head of cabbage, two chopped medium onions and four chopped garlic cloves, for thirty minutes.
2. Cube a pound each of smoked sausage, smoked ham, brisket stew meat, boneless brisket and hot chaurice sausage, and steam with two cups of the reserved greens broth for fifteen minutes, keeping the chaurice's rendered fat separately.
3. Purée the cooked greens.
4. Make a light roux, notably the dish's only roux step, by cooking five tablespoons of flour in the rendered chaurice fat for five minutes.
5. Combine the roux with the meats and puréed greens plus two quarts of the reserved broth, and simmer twenty minutes.
6. Finish with the chaurice, a teaspoon of thyme, a tablespoon of salt and a teaspoon of cayenne, and simmer a further forty minutes.
7. Off the heat, stir in a tablespoon of filé powder. Chase herself insisted Creole cooks always add filé to gumbo z'herbes, regardless of what published recipes say, a tradition bearer correcting the printed record directly.
8. Serve over steamed rice.

Notes

Most secondary descriptions of the dish call it the gumbo that skips a dark roux entirely, and Chase's own recipe complicates that flatly: it is not a dark-roux gumbo in the Cajun sense, but it is not roux-free either, and this chapter states both things as true at once rather than repeating the simpler version.

She began serving it on Holy Thursday from 1973, and in her later years over fifteen hundred people came specifically for it, with Chase reportedly cooking up to a hundred gallons in a single day.

What a modern chef changes

Sous vide meats and a two-texture purée

Method

1. Steam the five meats separately, sous vide, each held at the precise temperature its own texture needs, the chaurice rendered hot and fast for its fat, the brisket held low and slow for tenderness, then combine only at the final simmer, a genuine improvement on a single steaming step that currently treats five different cuts identically.
2. Pass a portion of the puréed greens through a chinois for a silkier base, folding the remainder through coarse for contrast, the same two-texture principle this atlas has used elsewhere for a leaf-based soup.
3. Dehydrate and finely grind a portion of the raw greens in a spice grinder into a concentrated green seasoning dust, finished over the plated bowl, so the fresh, grassy top note the long simmer inevitably loses can be restored at the very end.