Someone explain this okra in gumbo controversy.

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19th century recipes make clear that okra and tomatoes were the original base ingredients, and the first protein that consistently found its way into the pot was chicken. Only later were shellfish like oysters and shrimp incorporated. It takes a remarkable leap of imagination—or, perhaps, a dull lack of it—to think that gumbo evolved from bouillabaisse.

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So if not bouillabaisse, where did gumbo come from? The answer can be found in its very name. In several West African languages, the word for okra is ki ngombo, or, in its shortened form, gombo." Early on, the word was frequently used alongside "okra" by English writers. In the 1840s, when okra was just starting to be grown widely outside the coastal South, newspaper ads commonly offered seeds for "Okra or Gombo." "Gombo" is still the French word for okra today.

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The article also noted, "This is the dish we in America call gombo. However, we must distinguish this American stew from the one called gombo févi (italics added). This is done with the pods of a species of mallow, known to botanists as the sabdariffa." Févi, it turns out, is the Louisiana Creole word for okra, and the author notes that its thickening power is even stronger than that of powdered sassafras, which the Creoles called filé.

But which came first, the févi or the filé? Some commentators have argued for filé and claim the word "gumbo" actually comes from kombo, the Choctaw term for powdered sassafras. But I've not been able to turn up a single example of a dish being called "kombo" in any 18th or 19th century source, while there are countless examples of a dish made from okra being called either "gombo" or "gumbo." By the time Peyroux was writing his treatise on sassafras, Africans had been present in Louisiana for some 60 years, plenty long enough for their traditional okra-based stews to have entered the larger culinary culture of the colony.

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The most probable path is that Louisianians were eating a thick stew they called "gombo" after its main ingredient, okra. Cooks found they could achieve a similar thickness using the filé powder made by the local Choctaw, and they started substituting that when okra wasn't available.

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