f Mary Campbell, founder of Johnnie Mae’s Gumbo—a business named after her grandmother—views the dish as a window into American cultural history. “Making gumbo is an act of cultural creation and cultural retention,” she explains. Campbell is speaking to an African American Studies class from nearby Bishop O’Dowd High School who have come for a field trip to Emeryville’s Townhouse restaurant. Johnnie Mae’s rents the kitchen to serve meals a few Mondays per month as a pop-up, and the students have come for a lunch and educational program. Heritage in a Bowl of Soup As Campbell explainedd to them, her gumbo comes from a family recipe. Her grandmother, Johnnie Mae, grew up in Louisiana. “Louisiana is a state of jazz, big band music, blues, zydeco, Mardi Gras, and quaint cottages with secret gardens, and we have always had a large Black community,” says Campbell. In 1860, 47 percent of the population was made up of enslaved Black people. Johnnie Mae brought the gumbo recipe with her when she traveled west in the 1920s with her mother, grandparents, and two uncles from Louisiana. They came to the lumberyards of the small town of Weed, CA, where over one thousand Black people lived in company-provided housing. Later, the family migrated to West Oakland as part of the Great Migration, a cultural phenomenon in American history where Black people moved north and west out of the South to escape
MARY CAMPBELL
shellfish. German settlers brought pigs, chicken, and cattle for the milk, butter, and sausage included in many gumbo recipes. Sassafras and bay leaves, spices taken from trees native to North America and eaten by Indigenous people, also figure prominently in Campbell's gumbo recipe. The idea of gumbo was also inspired by Creole cuisine, created by 18th-century Louisiana farmers of European descent who wanted a new way of cooking for their new land. Creole chefs fused bouillabaisse, French fish soup, with Spanish seasonings and innovations from regional Black cuisine. “Creole culture transcends racial boundaries,” Campbell explained. “If you are Creole, you can be Native American, African, French, Spanish, or a mixture of any of those,” she says. Campbell explained that there are many different variations of gumbo, which originally depended on what plants grew and which animals lived in different local areas. “Black people in the South represent a variety of cultures and ways of cooking,” she says. For example, gumbo in Texas can be tomato- based while in Louisiana the dish tends to have a more traditional flour and fat roux sauce. Even though her family is from Louisiana, her grandmother’s gumbo recipe uses a tomato sauce rather than a roux. “So it’s gluten-free!” Campbell says.
DR BRANDI THOMPSON SUMMERS STUDENTS OF BISHOP O'DOWD HIGH SCHOOL
MARY CAMPBELL COACH TONY GREEN Unlock full access to The Summer’s Issue ’24
Sign Up
restrictive, racist Jim Crow segregation laws. Yet, they held onto their heritage through gumbo, whose name comes from “Ki Ngombo,” a West African word for okra. Campbell remembers picking okra from the garden to put in gumbo, a chore she hated because the plant is sticky. “I’d wear a sock on my hand,” she says. Gardening was a large part of her family’s Southern culture, and both of Campbell’s grandmothers had backyard gardens from which they harvested spices and vegetables. Ingredients from around the World As shown through an exhibit at Townhouse, with samples of ingredients out in front of signs discussing their origins, gumbo is truly an international meal. “In Louisiana cooking, onions, green bell peppers, and celery are our Holy Trinity,” she explains. Onions were brought to North America by the first European settlers; bell peppers are from Mexico and the Southwest, originally brought over by Spanish colonists; and celery comes from the Mediterranean. Homer’s Iliad mentions that wild celery surrounded the sea nymph Calypso’s cave. Okra originated in West Africa—although it was also grown in Egypt—and enslaved Black people brought it to North America with them. The seafood often included in gumbo comes from Cajun cuisine, from French Canadian refugees from Acadia who lived in the swamps and bayous of New Orleans and harvested
Already have an account? Sign In
144
145
Powered by FlippingBook