Gumbo Life

A sprightly, deeply personal narrative about how gumbofor 250 years a Cajun and Creole secrethas become one of the worlds most beloved dishes.Ask any self-respecting Louisianan who makes the best gumbo and the answer is universal: Momma. The product of a melting pot of culinary influences, gumbo, in fact, reflects the diversity of the people who cooked it up: French aristocrats, West Africans in bondage, Cajun refugees, German settlers, Native Americansall had a hand in the pot. What is it about gumbo that continues to delight and nourish so many? And what explains its spread around the world?A seasoned journalist, Ken Wells sleuths out the answers. His obsession goes back to his childhood in the Cajun bastion of Bayou Black, where his French-speaking mothers gumbo often began with a chicken chased down in the yard. Back then, gumbo was a humble soup little known beyond the boundaries of Louisiana. So when a homesick young Ken, at college in Missouri, realized there wasnt a restaurant that could satisfy his gumbo cravings, he called his momma for the recipe. That phone-taught gumbo was a disaster. The second, cooked at his mothers side, fueled a lifelong quest to explore gumbos roots and mysteries.In Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou, Wells does just that. He spends time with octogenarian chefs who turn the lowly coot into gourmet gumbo; joins a team at a highly competitive gumbo contest; visits a factory that churns out gumbo by the ton; observes the gumbo-making rituals of an iconic New Orleans restaurant where high-end Creole cooking and Cajun cuisine first merged.Gumbo Life, rendered in Wells affable prose, makes clear that gumbo is more than simply a delicious dish: its an attitude, a way of seeing the world. For all who read its pages, this is a tasty culinary memoirto be enjoyed and shared like a simmering pot of gumbo.