Plan B Forum

Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and fillet gumbo,
For tonight, I'm a-gonna see my cher ami-oh.
Pick guitar, fill fruit jar, and be gay-oh —
Son of a gun, we'll have big fun on the bayou

All the years that I've been listening to — and sometimes singing — this song, I've been singing it like above ... where the first line of the refrain refers to something called 'fillet gumbo'.  Now, not being from the south, I don't know a cotton-pickin' thing about a true gumbo except that it sounded like Louisiana's answer to Texas chili in that everybody had their own recipe, no one has ever agreed completely on what goes (or doesn't go) into it, and when it's done up properly it would make a dead man rise up out of the grave and walk three days to get a bowlful.

So to me, 'fillet gumbo' just referred to the meat ... a better cut of meat — a 'fillet' of something — rather than catfish, alligator, possum, or whatever else a person could get their hands on.

Come to find out, the line actually should be 'FILÉ Gumbo'.  'Filé' is a thickening agent, a powder made from dried sassafras leaves, and it is generally considered to have been first used by the Choctaw people.  So filé gumbo would be a gumbo made with this powder as opposed to some other thickener like cornstarch, masa, or crumbled-up crackers.

Now, I just wonder how I go about getting this changed/corrected on all these non-Wiki type sites like Lyricfind.

-"BB"-

And outside of LA you can spend a fair amount of time trying to find it on a store shelf.

I assume you mean NOLA not LA.

ex-khobar Andy wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 14, 2023 4:27 pm

I assume you mean NOLA not LA.

LA is also American postal code for Louisiana

You can make your own filé powder pretty simply just by trimming the ends of some sassafras branches and hanging them to dry for a week or so. Once the leaves have dried out, grind them up and voilà. It ain't rocket surgery. I make gumbo with a roux and okra, though, never bothered with filé. Maybe I'll try this summer when the sassafras leaf out.