My grandmother, Odette, came back to New Orleans on the third day after Katrina, which the police were telling people not to do and which she did anyway. She was sixty-eight years old and had lived in the Tremblé her entire life and was not, she told the officer at the checkpoint, going to be told she could not go home. She walked the last mile because the road was flooded to the tyre hubs of any car. She got to the house on Ursulines Avenue and found the first floor under four feet of water that was beginning to recede, leaving behind a tide line of mud and wreckage at shoulder height.
She found, in the cabinet above the stove — high enough to have stayed dry — a bag of flour, a bottle of vegetable oil, a can of diced tomatoes, some dried herbs, a bag of dried red beans, and three andouille sausages that had survived in a cooler. She found, in the backyard under the debris of the neighbour’s fence, her grandmother’s cast-iron pot, which had been there since before she was born and which she took as a sign. She lit the gas on the stove. Gas still worked. She started a roux.
I was not there. I was sixteen and staying with cousins in Baton Rouge. My mother called me that evening and said, ‘Grand-mère is back at the house and she’s making gumbo.’ She said it the way you would report something both completely predictable and slightly miraculous. We drove back the next morning and ate it in the kitchen, the mud still on the walls, the waterline marking every surface, sitting on the dry second-floor landing because the ground floor was not yet safe. The gumbo was the best thing I had ever eaten. I am aware that grief and relief and exhaustion can do this to food. I am also fairly certain it was simply the best gumbo.
Odette died in 2018, at eighty-one, in the house on Ursulines Avenue, which she had repaired and repainted and refused to leave. She left me two things: the cast-iron pot and the gumbo recipe, written in her looping cursive on a piece of notebook paper tucked inside the pot itself, as if she had always intended that to be how I found it.
The recipe is not simple, and she never pretended it was. A dark roux takes forty minutes of constant stirring and will burn if you stop. The trinity — onion, celery, bell pepper — must be cooked until it nearly disappears into the roux. The stock must be rich and real. She wrote at the bottom of the recipe, underlined twice: ‘Do not hurry the roux. A hurried roux is a burnt roux. A burnt roux is nothing.’
I make the gumbo every year on the last day of August, which is close enough to the anniversary that I mean it deliberately. I make it in her pot. I invite everyone I know. The first time I made it alone, I burned the roux at twenty minutes, which is the most common mistake, and I threw it out and started over, which is what she would have done, and which is what you do when something fails: you start the roux again and you stand at the stove and you stir.
