Notes on Filé
The Choctaw ingredient and its influence on Louisiana’s many gumbos
A few years ago, my parents—a born-and-raised Mamou prairie Cajun and his twenty-year transplant Texan wife—stood at attention in a cooking class by Chef Frank Brigsten of Brigsten’s Restaurant, who was going to teach them to make a chicken and sausage gumbo. “Now I know y’all are gumbo snobs out there,” joked the chef, who had trained under Opelousas native Chef Paul Prudhomme. My dad—skeptical but eager to be proven wrong about the superiority of our grandma’s recipe—laughed.
“What I remember most about that class,” he said, “is that he took a whole cup of file´—a whole cup!—and poured it into that gumbo.”
Like most families in Louisiana, gumbo-making in my house has always been its own ritual. Rainy, cold days curled on the couch come to mind, the air saturated with the savory notes of roux. We breathe that smell in for hours upon hours, intoxicated and lazy. When it finally, finally comes time to serve, we wait in line with our giant bowls—critically judging each sibling’s rice-to-broth ratio. The gumbo we make—most often, anyway—is of the chicken and smoked sausage variety (Teet’s, always). Growing up with a host of little brothers who hated all things green, we’ve generally stayed away from okra, and instead thicken our stew with more and more roux. Snobs we may be in some ways (I still don’t ever order gumbo at a restaurant), we have no qualms about using the jarred stuff—Kary’s to be precise. As my grandmother once said, “Why spend hours cooking something that someone else does better anyway?”
[Read Managing Editor Jordan LaHaye Fontenot's guide on making the most of gumbo weather here.]
With our bowls piping hot, we plop a scoop of potato salad in the corner. I always add a few plops of Tabasco to mine, and Dad always pulls out the tiny baby food jar that lives in the cabinet with all of our coffee mugs. Clear and label-less, with a blue Heinz cap, it’s filled with the bright green powder that is filé. Using a tiny sugar spoon, I collect a dash of it—just like Dad taught me—and sprinkle it over the top of my gumbo ever so carefully. If I put too much, the earthy, thymey taste overwhelms the meatier flavors of the soup.
The expiration date on the baby food jar reads May 2002. Working as a country doctor for the past twenty-five years, my dad has frequently brought home baskets of satsumas, freshly-baked bread, jars of pickled everything from his patients. The filé was one such gift, hand-harvested by some man whose name Dad has long forgotten. Using it as we did, as a seasoning—a dash, a hint—the jar never ran out until this year.
“We’ve always used filé as a seasoning,” Dad said. “That’s how I’ve always known to use it. But this New Orleans chef was using it to actually thicken the gumbo.” He said that he was worried the taste would overwhelm the flavor, but was pleasantly surprised to find Brigsten’s result—though very different from our home-brewed concoction—rich and satisfying, dare I say delicious.
Coming from the native sassafras tree, filé has been a part of Louisiana’s cuisine far longer than we’ve called this region Louisiana, and way before anyone had ever heard of gumbo. A significant herb in Native American—specifically Choctaw—culinary and medicinal traditions, the dried and ground leaves of the sassafras were originally called kombo. (Some researchers have posed the possibility that this is where gumbo as we know it got its name, though it is more likely that the word “gumbo” actually comes from the Angolan word for okra, kingombo.)
That filé’s use in gumbo traditions today varies as it does is hardly a surprise. The Louisianan dish is quintessentially Louisianan because of its infinite varieties, representing the rich diversity of cultures across the state—Native American, African, French, Créole, Cajun, Spanish, German—and all the ways those cultures have blended and melded over the last three hundred years. Gumbo in New Orleans is different than gumbo in Lafayette, which is different from gumbo in Mamou. And it is different from one side of the road to another, from house to house, and generation to generation.
Chef Brigsten’s generous use of filé in gumbo, however, turns out to be the more traditional method. According to food writer Robert Moss—who sought out the African American roots of gumbo using clues in early nineteenth century cookbooks—filé was first added to the traditional African okra gumbo during the winter months when okra was out of season, substituting it as a flavorful thickening agent to the stew. Over time, though, filé gumbo surpassed its status as a second choice, becoming the preferred recipe for many across the state and even receiving a famous nod in Hank Williams’’ 1952 hit “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)”.
Falling under the thick brown roux camp, rather than the filé or okra variety, our family’s gumbo recipe still calls for the Choctaw herb, just in smaller portions. So this year, when Dad found the jar empty, he looked to the little sassafras grove at our family’s camp and decided to make his own.
It wasn’t the first time he’d attempted it—with the help of his green-thumbed grandmother, he and a buddy had endeavored to make the stuff as part of a middle school social studies project. “We didn’t have time to properly dry our leaves, so we cooked them in the oven,” he said. “It was kind of a big ole failure.” But he still remembers how to identify the sassafras tree. At the camp, he pointed out that on a single branch you could find leaves that were single-lobed, double-lobed, and triple-lobed.
A few months before, he had taken my little brother with him to cut some branches. After consulting the community forum “Louisiana wild edibles, foraging & wild medicinal plants & mushrooms” on Facebook, he fashioned his branches into a bundle and hung them from the rafters of his barn, where he left them to dry for around six weeks. “I’ve seen people discuss, ‘How do you grind up your sassafras?’ and I saw that someone used a coffee grinder!” After getting it almost to a texture that he liked, he said he then ran it through an old-fashioned sifter we had in the cabinet. Then, he stored it in the old baby food jar.
“I did notice,” he admitted, “that it doesn’t seem to have as much flavor as the filé we were using before.” He wondered if there were certain details of seasonality or preparation that he may have missed.
It turns out that harvesting sassafras does depend quite a bit on seasonality. According to Choctaw tradition, August 15 is the sweet spot—though in recent years, peak harvest time has come earlier in the summer, likely due to climate change. In 2018, John Oswald Colson was named a Louisiana Tradition Bearer by the Louisiana Folklife Commission for his work as a filé maker. In countless interviews he has shared his process, which he describes as “sensitive harvesting”. Rather than cutting an entire branch, Colson picks the sassafras leaves by hand, one by one, to avoid damaging the trees. He then spreads the leaves on the floor, allowing them to dry under an air conditioner for two to three weeks, turning them occasionally by hand. After drying them, he destems the leaves and grinds them up using a traditional Choctaw tool called a pile and pilon—which is sort of like a large wooden mortar and pestle.
Like so many things in Louisiana, traditions build upon traditions. Communities, histories, and families become interlinked by the virtue of repetition, practice, and honor. So next year, in early summer, Dad and I will try again to make our filé, perfecting a centuries-old tradition that makes our own family tradition more perfect. But in the meantime, as we settle into the middle of gumbo season, his own batch will serve our ritual just fine.
Try your hand at Frank Brigsten's filé gumbo with chicken and andouille with his recipe here.