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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: Richard Stewart
Date: September 17, 2008
Location: New Orleans, LA
Interviewer: Sara Roahen

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Sara Roahen:  This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Wednesday, September 17, 2008. I’m in New Orleans, Louisiana with Chef Richard Stewart. If I could get you to say your name and your birth date and tell me your profession, we’ll get started.

Richard Stewart:  I’m Richard Stewart. I was born on December 2, 1953. And I am a restaurateur, and I like to think of myself as a cookbook author now also.

I’m here to talk about gumbo, of course, for obvious reasons, or reasons that will become obvious, but could you start by telling me where you grew up and where you had your beginnings?

I grew up in New Orleans not far from where we are right now in the University section of New Orleans. And my beginning as far as—?
On one side of the family I think I’m the fifth generation New Orleanian. My, I believe it’s great, great, great-grandfather has this big tomb in the Metairie Cemetery. Matthew O’Brian is his name.

Did they come from Europe, or do you know that far back?

Yeah, my heritage is all English, Irish, Scottish, so they came from that area [Laughs], and I believe they settled first in the Maryland area and then came down here. My father’s family was from Kentucky, and then Opelousas and Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

How did you get into the food business?

I just liked to cook. Ever since I was pre-teen I always had an interest in food, and I remember when my mother first got the Joy of Cooking, I remember reading almost the whole book and reading—I particularly liked the sections on Know Your Ingredients, which talked--illustrated how everything worked together: what, you know what an egg does, and what flour does, and all that. And I found that very helpful, like throughout my cooking career. And I would just read cookbooks and cook things or watch my mother cook things. And then when I was in college, I wasn’t working in a restaurant. I was a house painter and I was in business school after switching majors several times, and then the business school opened a school of hotel and restaurant administration and so I switched into that and started working at restaurants, and I just kind of went on from there.

Was your mom a particularly good cook? Was cooking and eating a big part of your life growing up?

Yeah, we always had--we always had a big dinner and my mother cooked dinner every night. We ate out sometimes, but you know we--she cooked every night, and a lot of traditional New Orleans foods: gumbo, grillades she would cook a lot, red beans and rice, that sort of thing, and lots of like stewed okra dishes—and she would call them gumbo. But it would be, say like a stewed okra with chunks of veal stew meat in it or something, and she would call it veal gumbo. And it was always dry; you’d serve it over rice on a plate, not in a bowl.

And then in the summer she would always make a more soupy gumbo and she would do it without a roux and just brown all of her onions and bell pepper and that sort of thing, and then add a lot of okra and shrimp and tomatoes and crab and sometimes oysters. And other than the oysters everything was in the peak of their season at that time, so that would be our summer gumbo. And that’s how I—that was my impression of gumbo. It wasn’t until [I was] much older that I had gumbo with roux in it, which she referred to as that old gravy gumbo. [Laughs]

Did your family identify as Creole at all?

No. No, just as New Orleanians I guess. I remember another thing while I’m thinking of it: she talked about her mother, who grew up in the Uptown area too, making what she called gumbo choux, which I think was made from cabbage. She remembered her mother making things like making a little roux and--and I guess putting some seasoning in it and then cooking, like, fresh string beans in it and serving it over rice. And they—it was a similar thing she would do with cabbage, and that’s what she called gumbo choux.

I think that you own the restaurant with the most sort of iconic name in all of New Orleans: the Gumbo Shop.

Yeah, I’ve heard Tom Fitzmorris [a New Orleans food media personality] say that. And I’m one of the owners. There’s another owner. I went and ate there one time and at that time it was this little mom-and-pop place owned by a woman named Margaret Papora. It was called—and it had, on the sign, I think Papora’s Gumbo Shop. And I remember telling my mother I ate there and that’s what she said: Oh yeah, they have that gravy gumbo there. [Laughs] And I remember it was dark, and--and you know it was just like a little joint. But Margaret Papora was married to Earl Long’s secretary, the governor, and this was her little business. I heard—I didn’t witness it, but I heard that every night at the end she would just take the cash register and dump it into her purse and leave. [Laughs] So then it—that was purchased by Bill Roberts in 1977, and I think it was--it must have been right around then that I just went and worked there as a waiter/bartender when I was in college. And then he [Bill Roberts] wanted to do an off-site kitchen because space is so valuable in the French Quarter, and all of the--most of the food served there lended itself to advance preparation: red beans and gumbos, New Orleans pot food, you know. And so he wanted to do an off-site kitchen so he could have more seating space there. And he asked me to open the off-site kitchen, which I did at some—I don't know what year, but—. I think it was maybe ’79. Something like that, yeah.

It was a little place we rented on Tchoupitoulas Street down around Felicity. It was a building there and this was—it used to be the cafeteria for the building and we just put in a big kettle. I think we started with a 60-gallon kettle, and we’d just make all the gumbo there and make everything—and salad dressings and anything we could make in advance we would make there and just bring it down to the restaurant every day or every other day, you know. Red beans always taste better the next day so it--it was good for that.
        
In the early ‘80s we bought some land and built the commissary that was much more suited for us. We had two restaurants, and so we--we started using the Cryovac system. Do you know what that is? It was just—we had a 125-gallon kettle then and you would—when the food was done you’d pump it into a one-gallon Cryovac bag and seal it. And it was hot, 180 degrees, and you’d drop it into this chill tank which was at 33 degrees, and it would rapidly chill it and keep it from cooking anymore and it would give it a shelf-life then without any--having any preservatives or anything like that. Just refrigerate it; you wouldn’t have to freeze it or preserve it or anything. And then you could just bring it down to the restaurant and heat it and serve it, so it was consistent—always consistent and very cost-effective ‘cause you’re cooking 125 gallons at a time.

Is that how you still do it?

Uh-hm.

So you’re talking just refrigerated and not frozen?

Yeah, right, right. And we do, we freeze it. People order it and we ship, you know, around the country, and we freeze it for that ‘cause consumers are more comfortable with it being frozen when you ship it. The other thing we did there at that time was we invented a roux machine and we--we converted a—it was a 60-gallon steam jacketed kettle. You know what is?

Can you describe it?

It’s a big stainless steel—and I don't guess my hand motions mean much here [Laughs] but—and there’s a jacket of stainless steel around about half of it, the bottom half, and this--this one was an electric one. So there are electric elements in that jacket and there’s some water in it, and the electric elements will heat the water and create steam that was trapped in this jacket around the kettle. So it functioned like a double-boiler but a little bit hotter because it was steam rather than just boiling water. And it was a nice way to cook soups and things because it wouldn’t stick and it was a very even heat. That’s how we do the gumbos and everything now. But you couldn’t make roux in it because it didn’t get hot enough to brown the flour. If you put oil in it, it would just--it would get to maybe 300 degrees, but it wasn’t enough to brown the flour. So what we did was remove the water from the jacket and added oil and worried about the thing exploding, but it worked [Laughs]. And we had an engineer or someone there who kind of knew what they were doing to help us and we had a little release valve and an overflow thing so it wouldn’t explode, and it worked. And the--the kettle had a full surface sweep stirrer, which was a big—like I guess if you can imagine, like almost like a wire whip, but it had these blades on it that would scrape every inch of the surface of the kettle, so that nothing would stick or burn, and that would—that was automatic. It would be turning the entire time the roux was cooking, and so we could put in—we’d use 20 gallons of oil and 200 pounds of flour and dump it in there and turn it on and we would time it. And we also had a thermometer into it, and so we’d have consistent roux all the time. Never burned. And we had two—we called—one was a 325-degree roux, and then a 350-degree roux, and that was the finished temperature. When the thermometer read 325, it was sort of a café-au-lait kind of color, and we would use that for, like, étouffée and shrimp Creole. And then we’d use the darker one for the gumbos.

I’ve found out so many things about roux that I didn’t know just by doing this. Like before we would make it in a braising pan, a tilt skillet, which is built like a big electric frying pan, and we would—and it was less. It was maybe five gallons of oil and 50 pounds [of flour], and then we’d just put it in there and turn it on kind of medium and then just someone with a wire whip would come stir it every few minutes. And we’d—that was the color; we’d just do it by eye, the color we wanted it. And so we matched the color with the roux out of the roux machine. But then when we cooked the gumbo, the--the gumbo was thinner. The roux didn’t thicken as much, and what I figured out was that when you’re cooking in the braising pan, even, you know if you stir it every five minutes, you have some that’s right against the heating element there and it gets very brown, and then you stir it up and it mixes--mixes with flour that’s whiter, so you get this even color but it was a mixture of very dark brown flour and sort of light-colored flour that created this--this color. And in the roux machine it was constantly stirred, so that every grain theoretically was cooked exactly the same amount, which was, you know, lighter than what was against the elements of the braising pan but darker than the bulk of the flour in there. And the less—the more you cook flour the less it will thicken because it gets like encapsulated with—it’s like deep-frying each flour grain, and so it wouldn’t thicken as much because there wasn’t that quantity of lesser-cooked flour in the same quantity of roux that looked the same color.

So let me just get this straight. It was the tilt skillet roux that thickened more.

Right, right, because what I imagine, it’s just a mixture of the very—little bit of very brown flour and the greater quantity of less brown flour.

Were you disappointed? Did you then make a lighter roux so it would thicken more?

Right, right. That’s when we started doing a lighter roux. Slightly lighter, yeah.

So it really depends on the apparatus you’re using?

Right.

It must smell delicious in there.

Yeah, it smells and it goes through these different stages too of smelling like—for a while it smells like a cake baking when you make that much ‘cause it does take a long time in that roux machine. And then it starts to smell like popcorn, I find, and that’s when you know it’s really starting to brown. When I tell people, when I do little cooking demonstrations and tell people about making a roux, I always say just not the color; just watch the smell and watch the bubbling of the flour, the bubbling of the whole—of the liquid—because as soon as it stops bubbling, that means all the moisture is cooked out of the flour and that’s when it really starts to brown quickly. And that’s when it will start smelling like popcorn or roasted nuts or something like that. That’s when you really have to watch it and keep stirring.

What kind of oil do you use for the roux?

We use soy oil, soybean oil, yeah. At home I use olive oil.

You could buy premade roux.

Yeah, I guess you could. See, well, people buy it from us. And then we did a shelf-life study on that. I did my own shelf-life study first and then I sent it to a lab. I put a little quart of it or something and put it in this back storage we had—you know unrefrigerated—and left it for like months, and then they brought it to the lab and it was totally inert. No bacteria or anything in it.

Do you have any opinions about the length of time that it takes you to get to a certain color?

When I make roux at home, I make it in five minutes. I just do it real high and stir it constantly with the wire whip and have my veggies ready to throw into it right away. I never understood this standing there for hours doing it.

Can you tell me what kinds of gumbo you make at the restaurant?

Yeah. On the regular menu there’s a seafood okra gumbo and a chicken andouille gumbo and gumbo z’herbes, and then we rotate special gumbos and soups including smoked duck and oyster gumbo, turkey hot sausage gumbo, a filé gumbo with chicken and sausage which tastes totally different from the other ones. And what else do we do? Turtle soup, and there’s one other gumbo—turtle soup, corn and crawfish chowder—.

Can you tell me a little bit about gumbo z’herbes?

Yes, gumbo z’herbes is traditionally a Lenten gumbo, eaten during Lent in this predominantly Catholic town, and it’s a gumbo made of greens. It’s supposed to be an odd number of greens—seven greens or nine greens. I guess it could be five greens too. Turnip greens, collard greens, mustard greens, cabbage, parsley you consider a green; I’ve heard of people that put dandelion greens in it or—all sorts of things. But we didn’t serve that until—I don't know when I started, maybe eight years ago, and just did it as a little promotional thing during Lent. And it was--got to be popular enough that we kept it on the menu all year ‘cause there are not many vegetarian items on our menu. And ours is vegetarian. When you look at old cookbooks, they’ll always throw like a ham bone in it, or--or sometimes sausage or something, and just—it seemed ridiculous to me that it was supposed to be this Lenten dish and--and it had meat in it. And so I wanted to make it without meat, and so I made it just without the meat and it just tasted like greens, you know. It wasn’t very—tasted good but it didn’t taste like--didn’t taste like gumbo at all. And it was also very light, too; you really couldn’t serve it as an entrée or anything—a big bowl. We do serve gumbo as an entrée at the Gumbo Shop. A lot of people get that.

We have a smoker at our commissary, so I smoked some mushrooms, [Laughs] and I made a roux with olive oil for this—olive oil roux—and then added onions and bell peppers and celery, the traditional [seasonings], and then added these chopped-up smoked mushrooms at that point, and then added all the greens. And I didn’t use--I didn’t want to use any chicken stock or anything like that, so I just, you know the greens generated their own stock. So I added all the greens and cooked it, and it tasted very good. The smoked mushrooms gave it a lot of depth of flavor and a savory quality, but it was still a bit light as an entrée I thought, even served over rice. So then I added just some cooked red beans to it and—not a whole lot but some, so it just gave me a little more substantial—and just had it on that menu for Lent. And now we have it on all year.

With your other gumbos, the more traditional gumbos, do you have any pet peeves or any rules that you wouldn’t break?

I don't break the—I’m sure you’ve heard this before, too—the okra and filé rule. I don't put okra and filé in the same gumbo.
No, but all those gumbos we do are very different, too. I do roux and okra in--in a seafood gumbo and in a chicken gumbo, and—yeah, Tom Fitzmorris [a food radio personality] gives me a hard time about that. Chicken gumbo should not have okra in it. But I grew up eating it like that [Laughs]. And then we do our turkey hot sausage--has roux, but not okra and no filé. The filé gumbo we do has filé and no roux or okra and we use a lot of filé and put it in with the sautéed seasoning vegetables at the beginning and then add the filé to the sautéed seasoning vegetables and mix it in like that, and then add the stock and--and chicken and sausage—and it’s the chicken and smoked sausage for that—and it has a totally different flavor that way. It’s still identifiable as gumbo. And then the smoked duck and oyster, we have roux but no okra or filé.

It’s dinnertime; this is sort of painful. [Laughs] One thing I’ll ask you: I think okra and corn really do go well together. And corn comes in season around the same time as okra and tomatoes, but corn is not an acceptable gumbo ingredient, is it?

No, no, it’s not. [Laughs] It doesn’t sound right. As they’d say in New Orleans, That ain’t right.

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

 

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