Word: gumbo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Southerners also enjoy a legacy of shared celebration. From the epicurean crab feasts of Maryland's Eastern Shore to a catfish fry in Tennessee, from Texan barbecue orgies to the days-long shrimp or gumbo feasts of Louisiana's Cajun country, Southerners are united in their love of a party-and its morning-after reconstruction. An old New Orleans saying: "The rabbit says, 'Drink everything, eat everything, but don't tell everything...
...Southern cuisine arrived by ship or afoot from many climes. Slaves came from Africa bearing benne (sesame seed), okra, yams and remembered formulas that were to become the masterworks of Southern cuisine. Frenchmen marched ashore to reincarnate such classic dishes as bouillabaisse, which is a culinary cousin of gumbo, a permissive potpourri that can include chicken, turkey, ham, crab, oyster, shrimp or anything else on hand. While New Englanders learned-belatedly-to raise beef and sheep, Southerners derived sustenance from the wild game and pigs and chickens that were raised almost as members of the family...
...list of the world's great foods would have to include such Southern elegances as she-crab soup, terrapin stew, jambalaya, black-bottom pie, gumbo or pompano en papillote...
...further complicated by the fact that many great Southern cooks have traditionally been black women who spurned the written word or, for that matter, any kind of regulation. The celebrated Mme. Bouligny, one of the last grandes dames of New Orleans society, had a Haitian cook who seasoned her gumbo with a voodoo prayer. "Getting directions from colored cooks," Harriet Ross Colquitt wrote in The Savannah Cookbook, "is rather like trying to write down the music to the spirituals which they sing -for all good oldtimers (and newtimers too) cook...
Many plants already in cultivation could be better used to increase food supplies. Spiros Constantinides of the University of Rhode Island has suggested that okra-whose viscid green pods provide the distinctive ingredient in gumbo dishes-could become an important source of protein if cooks would use its ripe seeds as well as its tasty pods. Researchers with the National Academy of Sciences have been studying a protein-rich "winged bean" that grows in New Guinea and Southeast Asia, and believe it could be successfully introduced into other warm rainy areas where the principal crops-yams, cassava, potatoes...