Roux, Brown and White, Creole (Picayune 1916)

This is the correction, and it is the reason I pulled this book off the shelf.

Your own Gumbo, New Orleans Creole, Jeff’s says the roux “should be as dark as chocolate,” cooked thirty-five minutes to an hour. That is standard modern Louisiana practice and there is nothing wrong with it. But the foundational Creole cookbook of New Orleans, printing its fifth edition in 1916, says the opposite in the strongest language it uses anywhere:

“In making a Brown Roux, this unfailing rule must be the guide: Never, under any consideration, use burnt or over-browned flour.”

And then, in case that was not clear: “Never make it too brown, because it must continue browning as the other ingredients are added.” The target is “a nice, delicate brown.” If it so much as smells scorched you throw it away and wash the pan before starting again.

It is one tablespoon of butter to one tablespoon of flour, and it takes minutes, not an hour.

I am not telling you your gumbo is wrong. I am telling you that the dark roux is a later development, and that a whole tradition of Creole sauces sits on top of a roux that is barely coloured. Both of these are real; they are not the same technique.

UNTESTED as written, though you have obviously made a thousand roux.

Ingredients

BROWN ROUX — Roux Brun

• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 tablespoon flour

WHITE ROUX — Roux Blanc

• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 tablespoon flour

A little broth or boiling water, to moisten

• FOR GRAVIES AND SMOTHERED MEATS — the book’s other ratio
• 1 tablespoon lard
• 2 tablespoons flour

Directions

Key ingredients

Bacon Grease · Salt

1. BROWN ROUX — Roux Brun. Melt the butter slowly. Add the flour gradually, sprinkling it in and stirring constantly, until every portion is a nice, delicate brown. -> photo 1
2. Stop early. This is the whole instruction. “Never make it too brown, because it must continue browning as the other ingredients are added in the order given in every recipe in this book.” The roux is not finished when you take it off the heat — it keeps going. Cook it to where you want it and it will overshoot.
3. The failure test: “If there is the slightest indication of burnt odor or overbrowning, throw the roux away and wash the utensil before proceeding to make another. Remember that even a slightly burnt sauce will spoil the most savory dish.” Wash the pan — scorched fragments in the pan will seed the next attempt.
4. WHITE ROUX — Roux Blanc. Made exactly like the brown one, except that butter and flour go into the pan simultaneously and are not allowed to colour at all. Moisten with a little broth or boiling water and boil a few minutes until thick. -> photo 2
5. This is the foundation of every white sauce in the book and of nearly all the purées. In a Sauce Velouté it should be coloured.
6. FOR GRAVIES AND SMOTHERED MEATS the ratio changes to 1 fat : 2 flour, and the book specifies lard, not butter.
7. On the fat, which is a small argument the book clearly enjoys having: “It is a great fad among many in our day to use nothing but butter in cooking. The Creoles hold that butter should be used in its proper place, and lard in its own.” Lard is cheaper, and “far preferable to an inferior quality of butter, and in many cases preferable to the best butter.” Then the barb: “it is feared that butter is used by many to cover up, by its taste, the deficiencies of having made the roux improperly.”
8. And the rule underneath all of it: “It is a great mistake to pile all ingredients, one after another, pell-mell, into a dish. The secret of good cooking lies in following implicitly the gradual introduction of the component parts in the order specified.”
9. Used in Gumbo, Oyster, Gombo aux Huîtres (Picayune 1916). Deliberately not used in Gumbo, Filé (Picayune 1916) or Gumbo, Okra, Gombo Févi (Picayune 1916).

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t The backbone is The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, fifth edition, published by The Times-Picayune in New Orleans in 1916 and copyrighted 1901, 1906, 1910 and 1916. The scan is the Cornell University copy, and it is in our Reference Library: library.fubsypoly.com/picayunes-creole-cook-book-1916.pdf I read the quantities off the page images rather than the OCR. The optical text of this book renders every fraction as a hyphenated pair — 1-2 for a half, 1 1-2 for one and a half — and it misread the 5 eggs in Pain Perdu as a letter B. If you go back to the scan yourself, go to the page image. UNTESTED. I have not cooked this version. The measurements are the book’s, converted to modern phrasing but not re-proportioned, and where the original is vague I have said so rather than inventing a number.

What this does and does not prove It proves that in 1916 the most authoritative Creole cookbook in New Orleans taught a light, quick roux and explicitly forbade a dark one. It does not prove that nobody in Louisiana was making dark roux in 1916 — a cookbook records what its author taught, not everything that was being cooked. Rural Cajun practice was not what The Times-Picayune was writing down, and the book is a New Orleans city book about Creole cookery. So: a documented data point, not a verdict.

Where the roux actually appears in this book Not in the chicken gumbos. It is in the seafood gumbos, in the sauces chapter where these definitions live, and in gravies and smothered meats. The book’s own framing is that the roux is “the foundation mixture” of sauces — it introduces it under Sauces for Fish, Meats, Game and Poultry, not under Gumbo.

Why a light roux thickens better — the mechanism the book does not give This part is mine, and I am labelling it as reasoning rather than quoting: browning flour breaks down its starch, and broken starch cannot gel. That is why a chocolate roux thickens so much less than a blond one per spoonful, and why modern dark-roux gumbos need either a lot more roux or a second thickener — okra, filé, or both — to get body. The Picayune’s gumbos get their body from okra or filé and use the roux, when they use it at all, for flavour and a little thickening. The two systems are internally consistent; they are just different systems.

Related You already have S.O.S., Bacon Fat Roux in the collection, which is the same technique with a third fat again.

Still open When the dark roux became standard, and where. I could not date it. Every popular account asserts a long tradition; this book is evidence against the tradition being universal in 1916 and evidence for nothing at all about 1850 or 1950. If you find a dated primary source that brackets the change, that is the single most valuable thing anyone could add to this page.