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Old Fashioned Creole File Gumbo

A Creole gumbo with ham, shrimp, oysters, tomatoes, onion, garlic, parsley, and file powder, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Old Fashioned Creole File Gumbo

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gumbo

  1. Fry the ham, onion, and garlic together in a pot.

  2. Add the scalded shrimp and their water, along with the tomatoes.

  3. Let the mixture boil for about 30 minutes.

  4. Add the oysters and their liquor.

  5. Bring the mixture to a boil again.

  6. Stir in the file powder.

  7. Let it boil once more.

  8. Remove from heat.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled rice.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Tomato + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

File powder
Thickens the broth and adds a distinctive earthy, herbal flavour.
Shrimp
Adds sweet, tender protein that flavours the broth as it cooks.
Oysters
Add briny flavour and tender texture when cooked briefly in the broth.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body to the broth.
Ham
Adds smoky, savoury depth from the frying step.

The step that matters

Stir in the file powder off the boil. File powder thickens by gelling and can turn stringy or clumpy if it is boiled for long. Remove the pot from heat before stirring it in, then keep the heat gentle.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, shrimp, oyster, tomato, onion, garlic, rice):

  1. Celeryfits about as well
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Corianderfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, shrimp, oyster, tomato, onion, garlic, rice. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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