Sunday Gumbo in Tremé

Sunday in Tremé, and the pot has been going since before church. The roux takes as long as it takes — flour and fat over a low flame, stirred and stirred, past blond, past peanut butter, until it is the colour of an old penny and smells like toast. Everything after that is quick. The roux is the whole afternoon.

The dish is named in an African language. Gumbo comes from West and Central African words for okra — the Bambara gombo, the Kimbundu ki ngombo — and by 1764 Africans in New Orleans were mixing cooked okra with rice. Enslaved cooks exchanged and combined what they had until the pot became a dish, and a great deal of Creole cooking was made by their hands. The other thickener is not African at all: filé is dried and ground sassafras leaf, and it is Choctaw. So is the word bayou, from bayuk, a small stream, by way of Louisiana French.

The first written gumbo is 1802, when the physician John Sibley described a dish made principally of okra into a thick kind of soup, eaten with rice — the food of everybody, he wrote, for dinner and supper. The next year the French colonial prefect Pierre Clément de Laussat served twenty-four different gumbos at one soirée. In 1885 Lafcadio Hearn, eight years in the city by then, published La Cuisine Créole and wrote that Creole cooking partakes of the nature of its birthplace. He left for Japan in 1890, became a Japanese subject, and took the name Koizumi Yakumo.

Dooky Chase's opened in Tremé in 1941. Through the 1960s Leah Chase fed gumbo and fried chicken to civil-rights organisers in the rooms upstairs, and her gumbo z'herbes on Holy Thursday is still the restaurant's day of the year. Twelve blocks away runs Bourbon Street, laid out and named in 1721 by the engineer Adrien de Pauger — for the French royal house, not the whiskey.

Bayou Creole Seasoning Blend is this shop's own reading of a Creole jar rather than a textbook one: paprika, thyme, onion and garlic with chipotle smoke, cumin, fennel and a little sugar under them. It goes in early, with the trinity. Paprika, Smoked, Thyme and Onion, Granulated are what a dark roux keeps asking for, Cayenne Pepper, Hot is the bird's-eye lot, and Fennel Seed, Whole is worth cracking in your palm on the way in.

Blackening is the newest thing on this table — a New Orleans invention of about 1980, butter-dipped fish crusted in spice and seared in cast iron so hot the cook wore goggles. The craze was big enough that Louisiana closed commercial redfish catching in January 1988. Cajun Blackening Spice Blend belongs in that skillet. Bourbon Street Vanilla is for after, when the plates are cleared and nobody is going anywhere.

Eight products. One pot, and an afternoon to stir it.