Gumbo Recipe....

I've been asked to share a recipe for gumbo and had fun looking through my grandmother's old cookbooks for just the right thing. In an old family recipe book that she and her 3 sisters put together back in about 1970 I found just the thing. Grandmother had titled the recipe after her husband and that made me smile. As I looked through her book I found recipes filled with the character of times gone by; times that one seems to ever hear of anymore......Hominoly Pie, Meat Pie A La Lu, Jambalaya, Corn Pudding and even Squirrel Mulligan.

If you decide to be adventurous and try this dish I am sure you will have fun with it. I've looked it over and to the best of my abilities I think it is a complete recipe. giggle giggle.....I have found that Grandmother would sometimes do like I am guilty of doing and not write complete directions for dishes. It is not an effort to sabotage the new cook. It is just that some mental footnotes seem to be a given at the time of transcribing because it is an often made recipe.

Like I said before, gumbo can have anything in it and is not designed only for shrimp and chicken. Both my cousin and aunt say that the more meat as well as the more kinds of meat included in the pot makes for happy eating.

So without further stalling, here is our family recipe for gumbo as written by my grandmother....

Johnny's Favorite Chicken and Shrimp Gumbo

by Pearl Gibson Davis

Ingredients:

1 large hen

1 cup flour

1 cup cooking oil

2 cups each of celery, bell pepper, and onion chopped

3-4 garlic cloves chopped

2 TBSP Worcestershire

1 TBSP Kitchen Bouquet

1 TBSP Accent

4 cans shrimp

File'

hot pepper and salt to taste

Boil hen until very tender. Remove meat from the bones and cut into bite sized pieces; set aside. Remove some of the fat from the broth and cook the vegetables in this. Cook slowly for about 1 hour or until very tender, adding a small amount of broth if needed to keep from browning the vegetables.

Make a brown roux with the flour and oil in heavy iron skillet, cooking on low heat and stirring all the time with a metal egg turner. Add this to broth and cook until smooth. Add vegetables, kitchen bouquet, accent and hot pepper and cook slowly for about 20 minutes. Add the shrimp and chicken and cook for about 10 minutes longer. Add file' just before turning out the fire (about 2-3 heaping TBSP). Moisten file' with a little water to make it blend into the hot broth better.

Remove and discard excess oil that floats on top. A few green onion blades chopped fine and added during the last 15 minutes of cooking greatly improves the flavor.

Serve with rice.

And there you have it; a tasty pot of the old fashioned south that your taste buds will flip over.

If you give it a try I'd love to hear how things went for you.

God bless your week!