In last month or two I’ve had claims that ‘the jews invented such and such’ forwarded to me – which I encourage incidentally as it saves me having to look for them quite so much – and one such was my friend J. Otto Pohl; who pointed out that jews are suggesting that they invented Gumbo. (1)
Gumbo for those who don’t know is a type of stew that is extremely common and much loved in the American South especially in and around the great state of Louisiana. The interesting thing about this claim is there is little commentary that I can find as to what exactly the jews claim as regard this other than misleading graphics and advertising suggesting that gumbo is a ‘jewish food’.
The truth is that gumbo originated in French Louisiana around the early to mid-1700s (2) and has often been claimed to have derived from the cooking of black slaves (3) as well as occasionally as a copy of an American Indian dish ‘served on the special occasions.’ (4)
The actual origin of gumbo is mired in controversy but one of the strongest and longest held positions on the origin of gumbo is a rather unromantic one: it is simply French bouillabaisse – a French fish stew from Provenance – with an increasing number of ingredient substitutions over time. (5) While the claim it is derived from black slaves now rests almost entirely on contemporary testimony from New Orleans in 1764 that two escaped black slaves were selling ‘cooked gumbo file and rice’ (meaning ‘cooked gumbo made from okra and rice’). (6) While this is superficially suggestive; the fact is said ‘cooked gumbo’ is from a French document not from blacks writing at the time suggests that this testimony implies the opposite: the French citizens of Louisiana are referring to what the escaped black slaves were cooking as ‘gumbo’ which suggests they knew what gumbo was and probably ate it themselves, which in turn suggests a likely origin for gumbo in bouillabaisse.
The substitutions wouldn’t have been limited to blacks either as this was common among French housewives of the colonial period. (7) If you combine this with later immigration of different European peoples with the different foods – especially sausage – that was brought over to Louisiana, notably the Germans and the Spanish. (8)
Then you get… well… gumbo.
So, no Gumbo is not a ‘jewish’ nor an ‘Israeli’ dish, but rather is a southern American dish derived from French, German and Spanish immigrants to the United States with some possible African culinary influence via the black slave population in the area thrown in for good measure.
References
(1) https://x.com/JOttoPohl1/status/1977035891286888573
(2) Cynthia LeJeune Nobles, 2009, ‘Gumbo’, p. 98 in Susan Tucker (Ed.), 2009, ‘New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their History’, University Press of Mississippi: Jackson
(3) Ibid., p. 99
(4) Idem.
(5) Ibid., pp. 99-100
(6) Ibid., p. 100
(7) Ibid., p. 101
(8) Ibid., pp. 101-102
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