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by the Track "[My gumbo recipe] came from my mother. It’s just something that’s handed down, and I’m very proud of it—that I happened to learn it, you know, from her because I know it came from her mother and that whole area [in South-central Louisiana], so I really feel honored that I was able to—as a kid—learn something about this.” – Billy Gruber A native of New Orleans, Billy Gruber grew up in the restaurant business. His father, William J. Gruber, opened his first restaurant at the age of nineteen. Over the years, the Grubers have operated more than a handful of cafés. But not until Billy opened the neighborhood joint, Liuzza’s by the Track, did he actually put gumbo on the menu. Today Billy makes what he calls a Creole gumbo. The recipe is a nod to his mother’s Cajun heritage, but Billy has definitely made the dish his own. Starting with a nearly black roux, Billy layers flavor after flavor, adding locally-made sausage, cooked-to-order seafood, and a secret mixture of thirteen seasonings. And to many people’s surprise, there’s quite a lot of okra in there, too—another one of Billy’s tricks that keeps bringing folks back for more. NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here. Subject: Billy Gruber --- Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on Friday, August 4th, 2006 in New Orleans, Louisiana, for the Southern Foodways Alliance; and I am with Billy Gruber at a home near Liuzza’s By The Track…We’re at the dining room table, and I have a bowl of gumbo before me, which I will dig into momentarily and—but first Billy, if you wouldn’t mind stating your name and your birth date for the record please, sir? Billy Gruber and, gee whiz, three—eight—forty-six, March 8th, 1946. Sixty years old. Sixty years young!...New Orleans, you know, I consider this one of the top three or four areas in the country for food because of the—because of the French, you know. I mean the original—the word Creole and what it’s done, meaning the French, etcetera, etcetera, and the Canadians. They got exiled out of Canada and so they sent—were sent down here. So when they came down here, the Cajuns, they got with the—was—that was French and then they got with the Africans, they got with the Germans, they got—that’s who New Orleans is; it’s such a mixture. It’s such a hodgepodge of every ethnic group you can think of. Now you were telling me before that you’re from Grand Isle [Louisiana] originally? Oh, we used to go there every summer and my dad—my dad [William J. Gruber] was a Senator in 1946 and he had—his first restaurant. He was in the restaurant business. His first restaurant he opened in 1935; he was nineteen years old. What propelled him into the restaurant business, do you know? Ah, he wanted something for his mother to do. She was—she came from Germany and so—they had four brothers, and he first did, I think, a snowball stand and then a little thing and wanted her—to have something for her to do…But he—as some of his friends used to say he didn’t let grass grow under his feet. He was a Senator; we owned six restaurants—all twenty-four-hours…Well that’s what he did then. And when he did that he would go down and do that at like ten until three or four in the morning. I knew my father getting up at twelve o’clock, having tea and toast, and then going down to the restaurant until my mother [Idea Mae Bourdeaux] made him come home and eat supper, as we called it, at five o’clock. And you know—and my mother—you’ll hear this again when we talk about my gumbo, but everybody asks, you know, “Is that your dad’s recipe, the gumbo?” We were nominated top in the city two or three years—Tom Fitzmorris, a main critic in the city—top gumbo by him. With Gourmet Magazine: “The best reason to come to New Orleans is the Gumbo and at Liuzza’s by the Track.” And you know countless people there. And they say, “Well, was that your father’s recipe?” And I said, “No, my mother was a Boudreaux from Chacahoula, Louisiana.” Chacahoula [Terrebonne Parish] then was a town of 500; today it’s 500. I don’t even think it’s on the map anymore. It’s north—it would be like central Louisiana. It’s north of Houma and then east of Gonzalez and Baton Rouge, so it’s, you know, kind of south-central Louisiana, and it’s—it’s a typical—it’s a different type of gumbo, you know. Want to talk about gumbos? Yeah. I wonder if you could kind of put words to how [your mother’s] gumbo merged with the German kind of influences in your house? Well it was probably—like I said, the—the gumbo is—is you know, it’s French, it’s African—the Sassafras weed, that was the—the filé; the okra comes from the African thing. And you know, it’s just all these different things. The German—I forget exactly—I’m not a really good historian; I just, you know, know taste. That’s the only thing I do know. That’s why I’m in the business. But it was just all this, you know, just this hodgepodge of everything. Like I say, when all the Cajuns came, when they were exiled from Canada and Nova Scotia, they came down here and then they met, you know, they were in the swamps. They had to deal with the wildlife, the gators, the—the crawfish, the—they had no—nothing. They had nothing. They were exiled from their homes. They had the clothes on their back. And it was told they came down here with their iron skillets and that was it. And then when they met with all these people there was really never—you didn’t have a lot of one-pot cooking, and that’s why you see down here—the etouffees, the jambalayas. Where everything goes into one pot and nothing is wasted…The spices came from different—probably that was a lot of French and all the natural herbs that were growing around the area at the time. So what is it about gumbo, then? Well like I said earlier, you know, when they ask you about the gumbo and no, it doesn’t come from my daddy; it comes from my mother, Boudreaux from Chacahoula, Louisiana. So it really has origins that go far back and—and you know and—you know, if you ask me—I mean when I go to a restaurant—I mean I’ve been told I have the best gumbo in the city and you know, I like it; I think it’s good. You know, I created it and my mother showed me, you know, kind of her version, and I did it similarly, very similar. And—but there’s fifty or sixty different types of gumbo. I mean, you know, from gumbo z'herbes, which is all greens and it’s all done in odd increments—three, five, seven, nine, eleven. There’s some stories behind that, but we’ll let that go for another day. And it was all greens that go into it. Then there’s this whole different—and they put this—all gumbos, they’re cooked the same. Like I do andouille [sausage] and chicken gumbo…Yeah, like the—I make—basically a lot—most of them are chicken and andouille [a smoked pork sausage] or chicken and smoked sausage and, you know, and there’s—there’s—you can take that alone and make thirty different types. I mean New Orleans, I think, would be known more for a thick gumbo. I know mine is thin, but it’s powerful and it’s just a lot of flavor. And what I like about mine is—and I tell people, you don’t need salt, pepper—you don’t need—and I don’t put a lot of salt in mine. It’s more chicken stock than anything because, you know, I use all natural bald chickens to get the stock…And my roux is black as the ace of spades, as they say – But anyway, my point is—is that, you know, like you do so many different gumbos and mine, what I do is—the difference in mine is—you’ll see a lot of them, you’ll see okra in it. And mine, you won't see okra because I cook mine at a minimum of four hours…I do twenty-gallons three times a week, and we sell a lot of gumbo. But I cook it no less than four hours and I have tomatoes—I don’t use tomato sauce, tomato paste as a lot of people; I use canned whole tomatoes. I kind of learned that from Paul Prudhomme, you know. Paul said that he uses canned tomatoes because when you use fresh ingredients it really sounds cool. You have—yeah, it’s good, it’s hip, but you can't rely on a fresh vegetable being the exact same taste every time. When you have a neighborhood joint, when you have a place that people go, they want to go there going I know what tastes like, so I’m going to go back to that exact same taste. I don’t want any other; I want that taste; I like it…So therefore you have a hint of tomato. And I believe that the real definition of Creole cooking is a hint of everything. When I do a sandwich, I don’t—even though I have a Vidalia onion and a Creole tomato and this, I want just a hint of a taste of everything, so when you taste it, close your eyes and you can go whoa—whoa—whoa! I got all these different flavors. What’s going on? But back to the gumbo, when I cook it four hours, in twenty-pounds, I put sixteen-pounds of okra, okay. It sounds like a lot. Okra in the old days was used as a thickener—a thickening agent, period. You either thickened it one or two ways: with a lot of roux and I don’t like it because then you become a flour-based taste and it’s just—and you can taste the roux; the other way is filé. You use—at the end of your Gumbo when you—when it’s set in front of you, you take filé which is the Sassafras leaf, I believe, or whatever and you just pour it in there, and it will naturally thicken it up, you know. But mine—it’s really funny because, you know, everybody says, “Oh, God, all that Okra? Eh! Oh, it’s slimy.” Well you don’t—you cook the okra before, number one. What we do is we put baking sheets in the oven and cook it for about a half-hour. Okra, the natural seeds in it are slimy, so when you cook it and bake it like that it takes—naturally it takes the slime out of it…But—and then you put it in the gumbo, so all—what you have is—and all of the sudden you’re watching it—you’re watching it—you’re watching it and all of the sudden in four hours there ain’t no okra. You don’t see any seeds; you don’t see anything. I make my roux beforehand. And once again…Paul Prudhomme, you know, when he’s the first one that did his gumbo, before he did his roux—the way he did the roux would take forty-five minutes to an hour-and-a-half. They were put on a slow flame and those women would sit there—or those men would sit there and just stir it. You got to stir it because it won't—you can't leave the pot or it will burn. And it’s equal amounts of flour and oil and that’s—you know, that’s basically it. And then you wait and after about forty-minutes later it starts—you know, it will start turning [color] in about twenty-minutes—it starts turning from white because you have white all-purpose flour and vegetable oil—peanut oil or whatever—and you start to see it turn gray—ashen gray—and then beige and then it will get into a little brown and then you start to get later to a little burgundy—get a little reddish. And that—that roux is your etouffee roux because that’s a little reddish, but you want to stop it there. But I go all the way with mine to the black. And you’ve got to pull it off before black because it will keep cooking fifteen to twenty minutes after [you take it off the heat]. So you go to Paul [Prudhomme], where I was saying what he did was, all of the sudden he puts that fire up on a humongous burner. I mean that—that oil gets 300, 400, 500-degrees and that’s why you hear it known—a lot of chefs will call it Cajun napalm, because you get that thing on you, it’s going through you, you know…I mean, you know, I tell everybody to get the hell away and you don’t leave that pot for anything; you don’t leave that pan and you just start stirring like a madman, and you throw in the big whisk and you’re going and you’re going. And you’re going to complete a roux in about eight minutes…and you take it off the stove, like I said, right before it becomes black, you know, when it’s deep, deep brown and it may be still going. You’re not going to stop 500-degrees like that, you know. It’s—so you pull it off the stove, off the heat and you put it over—and on the side. What you do, the best way to do is you have an onion already diced up celery or bell pepper or whatever and you take that and you don’t get close to it but you hold it at a little higher—like a foot away, and you kind of throw it in there and you [Sizzling Sound] and as soon as you throw it in there it’s going to ignite. And you keep stirring and you’ll see it start to molt…and you can see it start to cool down. --- Then we use smoked sausage…I bake the smoked sausage in there also but what I do is—a lot of people take the sausage after it’s baked and they’ll tilt the pan and let all the fat go out. And it’s not only fat, it’s—it’s just the juices that are in smoked sausage, which is not all fat. So anyway, I pour everything into this. Okay, so now we got the stock, the okra, and the sausage. So what you got is the smoked flavor, the thickener—no flavor—and then the chicken base and then the nuttiness of the roux. So about this time what I do is I go ahead and I’ll put all my herbs in. And I use thirteen different herbs including oh, like I said, a little salt. I might put three tablespoons of salt in a twenty-gallon pot, okay. So I have like thirteen different herbs in there…So from that moment on, everything I do is increments—and the most of the herbs I’ve put in there, the majority of them are thirteen spoons. And I don’t have it on me right now, but you can never find me without a large iced tea spoon in my back pocket. The reason is, you got gallon containers that all your spices are in, and when I do the measurement, I just go in and do [whoosh]—I mean that sound is I just shovel it in and take it out…So everything in there, you know, whether I do six spoons of this or—or not six—nine of this or five or seven—do everything in odd numbers [Laughs], it’s all do with the teaspoon. So now we got the herbs in it, so we got the flavor; we got that. But if you take a spoon—now let’s say that whole period is twenty minutes—twenty-five minutes that we’ve—the water has been boiling—got everything going. Well you take a big kitchen spoon and you put the water and you put it in the water and you hold it up and you look at it. And if you look at it, you’re going to see the center of it about the size of a fifty-cent piece and then the periphery of that will—will let’s say spread out to an inch. Well the guts of that is that fifty-cent piece. The outside of it is still water, okay. So if anybody tells you they cook a gumbo or, you know, in a half-hour, just tell them you know, talk to you later. But anyway, so thus, my point is—and I just let it roll from then on, and I let it roll to a strong boil—one hour, two hours. Well then, you know, you start to lose—it evaporates, so you got—I’ll fill it back up with water, you know. I’ve got a hose right there on the thing and get the low burner—if the thing is going and then at about three hours—three hours, fifteen minutes—three-and-a-half if you do that spoon test again, and you look at it you’re looking like if you were looking at roast beef gravy. It is all solid, meaning that there’s no water; it’s all just flavor. And then all of the sudden the herbs all marry into it; the okra has dissipated. The thickener—the thickness is coming into it. One thing I forgot to say is after the—the—the sausage you put in—w what I used to do, and I kind of changed a little bit—you cut up chicken thigh meat and in that—in that twenty gallons I put right about thirty—thirty pounds of sausage and about thirty pounds of chicken thigh meat. So then I put the chicken thigh meat in right around the sausage and okra time. But when you do that with raw chicken, well what do you get? What do you get if you boil in plain water thirty pounds of chicken? You get this humongous chicken stock that’s natural, so then you’re adding that into it. So you’ve got all of this really just natural stuff, you know. I don’t know what people think of gumbo elsewhere but hey, this is the real deal and, you know. So it—all—and then all of the sudden—. But what I do is I stage the chicken, meaning that I’ll put some of it in the first half-hour, maybe half of it, so that chicken by the end is not shredded but it’s kind of getting ready to shred almost. And then you have the other stuff I might put in maybe an hour before the end and that will be a little more solid, you know, something like that. But other than that, you know, and then it comes out and—and
then like as I told you earlier, I always try to regulate the
gumbo that it is never cooked on the same day you eat it because,
like red beans, which we cook three days before you eat it, gumbo
or any of the—well I guess, you know, we talked earlier
about the Cajuns the way they were the first—some of the
first people to do the one-pot cooking. Just think about that
and when it all marries together and then it hangs out with each
other overnight, and it all just sits there in that walk-in cooler.
What do you think it does? It all just—the flavors just,
you know—God, they get together so greatly…But anyway
yeah, and all of this stuff put together overnight, and when you
eat it that day and you eat it the next day—two different
animals in my book. You know, the thickness of it and—usually
when I make my gumbo I make it such that—I make it like
a concentrate, meaning it’s—it’s hearty and—and
I need everybody to be on the same page. Everybody who works for
me knows number one they have to carry around a spoon; number
two, the reason is you have to taste it everyday. You have to
taste that gumbo when you put it on because you’re going
to have to add a little water to it. It’s going to seem
too salty, but it’s not salty; it’s just a lot of—lot
of concentrated chicken stock, you know. And anyway, you know,
you do that and you add a little water to it. --- So is—I wonder, in gumbo-making and in families and communities, if the color of your roux that you use to make your gumbo is something that you want people to know. If it’s like a badge of honor to make a black, black roux—? No, New Orleans is about flavor. You know, when you come—when you come down here—and I don’t think a lot of people—I really don’t think a lot of people cook it that long to get rid of the okra. I really don’t think so, even though I know that’s one of the old ways of doing it because a lot of people love—I mean if you give me fried okra and ham and tomatoes, you know—excuse me; see ya later. I can—that’s, you know—. So a lot of people like okra and then—and then also what we do at the restaurant is we sauté the shrimp and oysters or whatever per cup or bowl, meaning that, you know, when you have that bowl you’re going to have the chicken andouille and then the guts of it but also we’re going to put the chicken, the shrimp and the oyster, whatever and it’s going to be sautéed and put in it. And so when you cook a gumbo, like if I was to cook a gumbo at home, first of all I’d use about two gallons of oyster water rather than anything because it’s a natural salt, and you don’t need any type of sodium or anything but you know—but you want it chocked full of stuff. So they’re going to leave the okra in it; they’re going to make it a lot thicker. And most people I know who do gumbos at home—whether you do a duck gumbo or whatever, you want it—they want it full of stuff, you know. That’s—to me, that’s the badge of honor of—of a home-style Gumbo. You know, when you get, “Hey, come on over. I’m making some—cousin Laramie shot ten ducks. I made some duck gumbo,” you know. So that’s kind of what, you know, that’s—that’s more the badge, you know. I don’t think it’s the color of black [roux]—I don’t think. --- With a mother from Cajun country and growing up with her gumbo and then—I might be wrong, but on your menu do you call—you call your gumbo Creole Gumbo, right? Yes. Yeah, because it’s everything. It’s a mixture of everything. Can you talk about that a little bit more? Because with the Cajun influence—and so the Creole gumbo—and Creole kind of, to me, is being New Orleans—urban-New Orleans specific. Well the Creole is really—I mean it’s Cajun—and that’s a big—that’s a big discussion right there. I mean when I was younger I didn’t like to be considered Cajun. You know, when I went in the military in 1967 [I said,] “Oh no, I’m from New Orleans. Oh no, don’t compare me to those crazy people.” Because I mean, you know, they were—yeah, those were people who came out of the swamps literally, you know. I mean because they caught all the crawfish in the swamps, they caught the alligator further down and, you know, like I said, everything—but there’s two different schools on that. You know the—the Cajuns, they’re—we’re the ones that come from Nova Scotia and the Creole—the Creole goes, you know, into the French and it goes into everything. We haven’t mentioned filé at all. What do you think about filé gumbo? Do you have a taste for it or no? Yeah, I guess. I just like flavor. It doesn’t have—I’m not—being a—a soup guy, I don’t care what consistency it is; as long as it’s got flavor, I’m for it, you know…I don’t care about consistency or the thickness or whatever, as long as it’s got flavor. That’s why my gumbo is thin, but every spoon speaks for itself. I mean it has a lot of power. Well what would you say your gumbo says about you? [Laughs] Wow! Never heard that question. It came from my mother, you know. It’s just something that’s handed down, and I’m very proud of it—that I happened to learn it, you know, from her because I know it came from her mother and that whole area, so I really feel honored that I was able to—as a kid learn something about this, you know. --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
Introduction | Interactive Map
| A Short History of Gumbo |
Oral Histories | Recipes
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