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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.

Edited Transcript:

Subject: Marie Hebert
Date: September 26, 2008
Location: Arnaudville, LA
Interviewer: Sara Roahen

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Sara Roahen:  This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Friday, September 26, 2008. I’m in Arnaudville, Louisiana, I think, with Miss Marie Hebert. Could I get you to say your name and your birth date?

Marie Hebert:  All right. Marie Hebert—H-e-b-e-r-t—and my birthday is August 17, 1957.

I’m here with Miss Marie because she’s canning some gumbo and—. So you are making potato salad, if we hear any sounds in the background.

That’s right. I’m chopping up my potatoes because we like ours kind of smashed a little bit. Some people like their potato salad in chunks but I like mine more smashed, so I--I chop it up. Now today on the stove we’re going to have a gumbo. I’m making hen; we always use hen when we make gumbo instead of chicken because it--it doesn’t fall apart as easy. Plus it has a stronger flavor, the juice has a stronger—so we always use a hen when we cook a gumbo. And I’m fixing my gumbo: hen, smoked sausage, andouille, and eggs. We put eggs in ours also.
        
See, in the olden days when people first started making gumbo you make it—they would make it because it would stretch. You could feed a lot of people with just one chicken, you know. It fills a whole lot of bowls if you make it kind of soupy. Well in the olden days or—and even now, meat is well your most expensive ingredient. So in the olden days when people had their own chickens and their own animals you put eggs in the gumbo because it adds more protein and you can feed more people with it. So we--we go drop in an egg for everybody today just to get a taste. We’ll have a little piece of hen, a little piece of sausage, and--and an egg in each bowl. And that’s how I can it.
        
When I can I try to—I cook my food, my gumbo, completely just as if I’m going to eat it right then, so that when I open the jar I don’t have to re-cook it. It’s ready to go on the spur of the moment and I put enough for two servings. One quart jar will feed two people, so when I fix the--a bowl today, like I said, we each are going to get a piece of a hen, a piece of sausage and an egg; so when I can it I put two pieces of chicken, two pieces of sausage. You see, that way it’s two full meals because a one-quart jar will--will produce two soup bowls of--of gumbo. So I go ahead and can it ready-to-serve. This way, if we’re having gumbo one night, company shows up, whoop I just pull out another jar. If I need one more [serving], I get a pint. If I have two people show up I get a quart. And no one--no one knows that it was, you know, a surprise. [Laughs]

Sometimes it actually is more cost-effective to buy things that are already commercially canned because they can--they do it in such large quantities they can do it cheaper. But I choose not to do that because I like the idea of being able to pronounce all the ingredients that go in my food. You know, there’s no chemicals, there’s no preservatives, and let’s be clear about this:

Just like a can you buy—a can of soup or a can of beans that you buy at the grocery store—anything you can, like I’m going to show you today, the shelf life is the same as if you bought it commercially done. Just the other day when I did that workshop in--in Abbeville for Marcelle [Bienvenu], I brought a can of figs I had preserved seven years ago. And when I told them, I canned these figs seven years ago, you could see some of their eyes bulged out; they started getting nervous. So I--I dumped the figs in a bowl and I said pass me a fork, so I ate one first. Well when it didn’t kill me, everybody wanted to sample it, you know. And the truth is we were canning figs that day, so we had fresh figs we were canning on the stove and we had a can that I had done--a jar that I had canned seven years earlier that tasted the same. They looked the same; the consistency’s the same. As long as the seal is not broken, as the canning process has not been, you know, interfered with, the shelf life is good.

I’ve eaten—we always—we rotate our stock, you know. We eat the older stuff first just--just to be safe, but the truth is I’d say about a--maybe a month ago I opened a can of figs that had been canned by my mother 10 years ago, 1998, and they were fine. [Laughs] It’s, you know, people don’t--people don’t realize when you go to the store and you buy a can of beans off the shelf or whatever, they don’t stop to think, Long before that can ever made it to the shelf it was sitting in a warehouse somewhere. And don’t think that they make that stuff fresh every day and ship it out. No, it could sit in the warehouse for two, three, four, five years, and then it gets transported in 18-wheelers that are--are hot and not refrigerated, you know. Then the stores—like big box stores like Wal-Mart or whatever—it stays in their warehouse for a year or two, so I mean it’s not as fresh as people think. But just like the canning I’m doing today, as long as the canning has not been compromised, the canning process, the food—the shelf life is great.

Like those figs that I canned the other--for the workshop, you know, they say, Oh it’s so much trouble, and it is. It is a lot of trouble, and you’ll see today it’s--it’s hard work, it’s long work, but it’s rewarding when you step back and you look. It’s a beautiful presentation in the jars and stuff, but as opposed to, let’s say, freezing. Why don’t--why don’t we just freeze our gumbo? Well, first of all, there is no food—no meat, no fish—that you can keep in your freezer for seven years. That--it would not be good anymore. But those figs and some of the--you know, some of the jambalaya and other things that I’ve canned before, you can keep them for seven--ten years despite—. You know it sounds scary, but like I said, the cans you buy in the store, their shelf life is long, too.

So one reason why I can is because you can keep it for so long; it never gets freezer burnt. It doesn’t dry out. As long as that jar is sealed, the food is the exact same as if I had just cooked it that morning.

What got me interested in canning out here was I never lived this much out in the country before. And I always had an interest in canning, you know, preserves and jams and jellies because I love to eat, but when I moved out here, I faced a dilemma that I had never had before in other places that I had lived. And that is, for some reason out here in the rural countryside parishes they just randomly turn off our electricity like twice a week—or our water. Some days you’ll be doing housework and you’ll go to turn on the faucet and, Oops, we don’t have water. They just without warning randomly shut off utilities and stuff out here in the country. [Laughs]

So you--you know we’ve lost food in the past, and as I said, when Hurricane Katrina hit, it just so happens that hurricane season falls right at shrimp season. And there is no Cajun that is not going to go out and get their shrimp. Well just like everybody else, we had bought two ice chests, about 100-pounds, of fresh shrimp. And I had just de-headed all that, cleaned it, and froze it when Katrina hit and we lost an entire freezer of shrimp I had just bought. And we could not afford to replace it, so that was the final straw. I said, Fine. I--if I can can fruits, if I can can vegetables, I bet I can can food—entrées. So that’s what got me interested in researching and canning: how to can beyond just the traditional things and--and do gumbo, jambalaya, spaghetti, different things. I’ll show you some of the things that I can.

She’s cutting up some eggs for the potato salad. When you talk about putting eggs in the gumbo, you mean hard-boiled eggs right?

Well there’s two ways that people put eggs in their gumbo when you go places. Some people boil the eggs, hard-boiled eggs like what you said, and then crack them and put them in the gumbo to help—because it absorbs some of the gumbo flavor. Other people who are more adept at it than me crack the eggs, the raw eggs, directly into the gumbo and let them boil in there. But every time I’ve tried that they always break apart.

So we’re at a waiting point because you put the canning pot on the stove, huh?

And some water and I was heating up the water inside. And what I’m saying about the water is when—unlike water-bath canning, where you just have to submerge your jar of preserves or pickles for a few minutes—in the water-bath canning you need a lot of water to be able to submerse a jar. But in pressure canning you do not want a lot of water. You only put like three inches of water in the bottom of your pot. So your jars will be sticking up over the pot. But it needs to be boiling water. You cannot take hot gumbo and put it in a--a cold water pot because it will crack the jar. So you have to put hot gumbo in a hot pressure canner.

When I had the recorder off for a while, you told me that you taught art. And you see this as an art.

Yes. You know as an artist myself, I own very few of my own drawings and paintings. Most of them I’ve given away to people that I—my family members or people that I love or whatever. What an artist is drawn to do is express themselves; it’s in the expressing, in the doing, that you say who you are or--or you put yourself out there to the world. The finished product is what you can give away or sell or live off of or whatever, but the true artistic action, the creativity, happens in the doing, and so even though the finished product is beautiful or meaningful to behold, that’s how it is kind of with canning.

My gumbo, of all the people you’ve interviewed, my gumbo is not going to taste like anybody’s. Everybody’s gumbo tastes different. So when I can this, when I package this, I’m saying, This is me. I’m giving a part of myself, I put myself—it was my sweat, my idea, my recipe, my process. It’s a part of yourself you’re giving to the world just as if I had done a painting or just as if I had done a quilt or--or what have you.

I wanted to just ask you about the gumbo itself a little bit.

Well, for my gumbo here’s what I do, and everybody has their own system and their own style. And one thing I’ve noticed is as Cajun becomes more commercialized—it’s becoming more commercialized; a lot of these restaurants that you go to are these purportedly Cajun chefs you see on TV on all these cooking shows. I think they sometimes kind of elaborate and dish out what they think the public wants to hear. But the truth is, authentic Cajun cooking is really just about simplicity. Keep it simple, keep it heavy, and find a way to stretch it.
        
So we don’t—the truth is real Cajuns don’t cook with a lot of wine and all this stuff that you see a lot on TV. So my supplies, my ingredients, are very simple. I cook my roux. I dissolve my roux in boiling water, simmering water, for two hours before I ever put any meat in it. And I do that because roux, just like anything else that you mix in with water, as it starts to dissolve it breaks into small particles and granules. And the truth is while you’re cooking your roux, you can dip a spoon in there and you can see little brown specks floating in the water. Well that’s the roux breaking up.

Now roux that is almost cooked and roux that is completely cooked have two different flavors. There are some people who have stomachs a lot stronger than mine that like kind of a bitter bite to it. Well those rouxs you would not cook as much because, just like any food that you cook, the longer you cook it the more it starts to--to fall apart—meat or anything else. And so the more you cook it the more mellow each bite gets because its flavor and juices have been dissipated, you know, throughout the whole pot. So if you like that bitter taste you wouldn’t cook your roux as much. But I don’t. I like mine very smooth, so I cook my roux in water for two hours before I ever do anything. That way I know it is solid brown and you don’t see any specks in it or whatever.

I use roux a lot. I like fricassees, stews; I like all that. I make my own rice dressing stock. I do all that. So about once a year, and it’s usually around September—it’s right before hurricane season and right before we get any cold snaps—I make roux galore. I make jars and jars of roux. You can keep roux in the refrigerator, believe it or not, even longer than you keep canned goods. [Laughs] It will stay—it will keep forever.

So by cooking mine two hours to start off, every now and then I can get my spoon, I can dip it in, and I can see what color chocolate is my roux. If--and it’s the spoon test. I’m sure you’ve heard about it; everybody I know, this is how you tell the gumbo. You don’t want to see the spoon. When you put your spoon in your bowl of gumbo, if you can see the spoon then your gumbo is too thin. So when I dip my—when I’m testing it out, I dip my spoon in there. If I can see that--the silver spoon in the bottom, it’s too thin.
Or when you go to someone else’s house—we used to do this with my aunt all the time because her husband did the cooking and we weren’t too sure. So we all, when we’d get there to her house—she has us over every--every Christmas to open presents and they always make a gumbo. Well her husband makes the gumbo and sometimes it’s kind of off. So when you walk in the house, the first thing you do is you ask one of your aunts or uncles, Can you see the spoon? [Laughs] Well that’s—you’re asking, Is it going to be good gumbo; is the gumbo going to be good today or not?

But by cooking [the roux in water] for two hours I have a chance to get it to the right consistency I want before I ever add my meat. And then, like I told you in the beginning, my meat—I always use a hen because a hen and a chicken, number one, have two completely different flavors. A hen has a richer flavor than a chicken. And secondly, because you cook the gumbo so long, and then on top of that you can it for so long, you don’t want a meat that’s going to fall apart and break into pieces. And chicken falls apart off—and shreds a lot easier than a hen does.

And I cook my bones. When you go to fancy restaurants and stuff, I guess for etiquette reasons they--they de-bone the chicken for you. But you know, when people come to my house to eat it’s like, Look: not only am I not going to take it off the bones for you but I’m not going to eat it--I’m not going to chew it for you either. [Laughs] If you can't—you can take your own chicken off the bone. [Laughs] But I like to keep the bone, not just out of laziness but because it really does serve a purpose. The bone is where you get a lot of the flavor from. You know when people buy chicken—I make my own chicken stock, for example, but even people who buy chicken broth in a can or chicken stock in a can, the misconception is that that’s boiled from chicken. It’s not; it’s from the bones. The bone and the marrow—you crack the bones. That’s one reason when I cut up my hen, even like the leg, I don’t leave any piece whole. I’ll take a big old mallet or hatchet and I’ll chop the pieces, even the leg, like in half because I want to crack and expose the inside of that bone, the marrow. That’s where the flavor and a lot of the nutrition is.

So I use a hen, andouille, and I’ll either put smoked sausage or I’ll put fresh sausage. I make my own fresh sausage, mostly just because I like to, but not every place--not every place sells fresh sausage, fresh pork sausage, so—. And I grew up eating it, but meat markets today, now you don’t really have that many meat markets. You mostly have a meat section in the grocery store; it’s not quite the same thing. So I really like pork sausage so I thought, If I want to eat it I have to make it.

So is this your standard gumbo, or do you ever make, like, an okra gumbo?

Well on the years that I grow okra I make a shrimp and okra gumbo sometimes, which I really like. But my standard gumbo is this, is the hen, because, again, back to the basics. I mean we love the taste of it, of course, but let’s be honest: people make dishes like gumbo and soup or whatever to stretch. So chicken and hen is cheap, so that--that is my standard one, and I live close—like I said, very close to a sausage factory, so I’m able to get bulk sausage at a discount. So for me, this is the cheapest. I could feed an army. I could feed several families, you know, just for a couple of dollars. So this is my standard one because it is cheaper to make and I like it.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

 

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