Etouffee - tomatoes or no tomatoes?

Tablespoon of tomato paste,

No

I prefer not...and you're gonna get screwed with pretty good, you see.

Many of the bayou cajuns I know use the term etouffee to refer to things cooked slowly, in small amounts of liquid, rather than using the term as designating a particular set of ingredients. Where I'm from, you can have an etouffee des patates (a dry-ish sort of potato stew, made with a little bit of light brown roux, usually including a handful of dried shrimp)....or a duck, shrimp, chicken, or pork etouffee. Whether or not any of that includes a few tomatoes (or a little tomato paste) depends on the cook and the season. Even folks who normally disdain tomatoes in most things will add one or two chopped fresh tomatoes to the pot if it's peak tomato season & the damn things are everywhere and need to be used.

Basically, etouffee = smothered. There is no grand codified central compendium of Cajun cooking, despite the aspirations of John Folse (who's from the River Parishes) or Donald Link (of southern/german/and a little cajun extraction, from the western prairies). As much as restaurant chefs & TV & cookbook authors want to make Cajun cooking a fixed and orthodox thing, it ain't. It is firmly in the hands of French speaking, wooden spoon yielding, beer drinking regular people who can and do switch things up, use canned cream of mushroom soup, learn & borrow from their new immigrant neighbors, and don't give a flyin' flip whether someone else "approves" of their variations & riffs.

All that ranting made me want to cook a routee, yet another related but different dish in the great bayou cajun list of dishes no one outside the region knows much about.

Hell to the no

I like tomatoes. But then again I'm trash.

I don’t use them, but etouffe is one of the few dishes I understand why you’d use Rotel.

Yes.

And serve over “dirty rice” like all the pretend Cajun restaurants in Texas.