Gumbo

I don't have a gumbo. I have a range I keep working across — from a simple sausage gumbo with shrimp in it out to a full seafood gumbo — and I am always refining it. What I could never get a straight answer to was the simplest question: what actually makes a gumbo a gumbo? The answer, it turns out, is that nothing does. Gumbo never had one origin, so it has no one authentic version, and the thickener you reach for tells you which ancestor you're cooking from — okra from West Africa, filé from the Choctaw, roux from France. Three answers to one problem, from three continents, all still in use. Which is why the argument is unwinnable, and why the honest thing to do with gumbo is exactly what I have been doing: keep changing it.