“Gumbo Filet Powder is made of the tender young leaves of the sassafras,” wrote Jane Gilmor Howard in her 1873 cookbook Fifty Years in A Maryland Kitchen, “picked in the Spring, and dried carefully in the shade as you do herbs; powdered fine, bottled and corked tight. It is much used in New Orleans.”
This explanation was doing one better than Howard’s relative Mary Lloyd Tyson had done in her 1870 cookbook The Queen of the Kitchen. Tyson’s recipe, for “Gumbo Fillet,” didn’t presume that the ingredient needed any explaining. “Stir in 1 table-spoon of fillet, if it is fresh,” she wrote, “if not, put 2.”
Howard copied many recipes from The Queen of the Kitchen, but this was not one of them. Tyson’s recipe was pretty open-ended. She suggested readers add “as many oysters as you please” and advised that “Gumbo can be made of either ducks, pigeons, or cold turkey.” Jane Howard settled on a quart of oysters and a chicken.
Gumbo recipes containing okra are plentiful in Maryland cookbooks and recipe manuscripts dating back to the early 1800s, but Gumbo Filé is a bit of a specialty item. Elizabeth Ellicott Lea included an okra gumbo in her 1859 book Domestic Cookery, but as far as she knew or cared, sassafras was best used in a poultice (also containing bread crumbs and milk. If you have a flesh wound you might want to steer clear of Lea.)
When Tyson presented “Gumbo Fillet” in Queen of the Kitchen, she commented “This is a favorite dish in the Southern States.”
This may be an example of the mystique of antebellum cooking and lifestyle that was implied in the recipes of Tyson and Howard, who both had plenty of Confederate ties. In 1898, Mrs. W. A. Fisher contributed a recipe each for gumbo with filé and okra for Recipes Old and New, a cookbook produced to benefit the Confederate Relief Bazaar.
While one theory of the origin of the name “gumbo” traces the word to West African words for okra, in the language of the Choctaw people, sassafras powder is called “kombo.” That raises too much confusion for me to write much more about gumbo at present.
What attracted me to this recipe was the name signed at the bottom of the page on which it was written.
The Frick Family Papers collection at the Maryland Center for History and Culture contains numerous recipe books and loose scrap collections. A lot of the recipe collection is associated with Jane “Jeannie” Turnbull, who lived in Washington DC from 1841-1912. Though Turnbull remained unmarried throughout her life, she seems to have been something of a socialite, who was invited to receptions and dances at embassies and at the White House.
Sifting through the Turnbull recipe collection, I was greeted with a variety of recipes written in bound books, newspaper clippings, and scraps of paper typed or handwritten by family friends and acquaintances. Many of the names are vague or the handwriting illegible, but there were three recipes – for “Jumbalaya!,” Terrapin, and Gumbo Filé with an elaborate signature at the bottom: “M. E. M.Ilhenny, Avery Island, La.”
Mary Eliza McIlhenny was born Mary Eliza Avery in 1838 to Sarah Marsh Avery and Daniel Dudley Avery, who was a Baton Rouge lawyer, state senator, judge, and sugar planter. (You could wonder how someone could be so accomplished if you momentarily forget that the family enslaved a bunch of people.) In 1859, Mary Eliza married one of her father’s business associates, Edmund McIlhenny, a banker who was originally from Hagerstown Maryland.
McIlhenny family lore is plentiful, but often poorly substantiated. Edmund McIlhenny’s great-grandfather is said to have immigrated from Ireland in the 1740s, with the family origins tracing back to Scotland.
In America, the McIlhennys established themselves around southeastern Pennsylvania.
Edmund’s father John, born in 1780, ended up in Maryland when he “eloped” with Ann Newcomer. Tabasco: An Illustrated History by Shane Bernard, mentions that Ann was said to be “a Baltimore girl.” Other genealogies online put her birth around Lancaster Pennsylvania.
One family tree shows Ann having five siblings, including a sister, Elizabeth, who married John McIlhenny’s brother, Joseph. Joseph and Elizabeth appear on Washington County censuses and marriage lists.
Considering the two parallel family marriages and close residence, John and Anns “elopement” seems a little dramatic.
At any rate, John and Ann settled in Hagerstown around 1810. John operated a tavern that advertised availability to “Genteel Boarders,” and was also involved in politics and banking. Edmund, the second of nine brothers, was born in 1815.
After his father died in 1832, Edmund left Hagerstown, and possibly spent some time in Baltimore before moving to Louisiana. In 1859, Edmund married Mary Eliza Avery.
I couldn’t find any apparent connection between the Averys/McIlhennys and the Turnbulls/Fricks, but if there was one, it probably came about in Louisiana rather than Maryland. Edmund McIlhenny may have spent a few years in Baltimore, but he didn’t really make his fortunes until he lived in down South.
Courtesy of the Maryland Center for History and Culture, PP57 Box 1 Folder 2
Jane Turnbull’s father, Col. William Turnbull, was in New Orleans as an engineer to build a customs house in 1848-1849.
It’s most likely that the recipe made it’s way from Mary Eliza McIlhenny to Jeannie Turnbull through the social networks of their generally Confederate-sympathizing families. Its hard to ever know who was acquainted and how. The recipes themselves are one clue.
Although I found a few references to Mary Eliza’s own handwritten recipe manuscript, none of her recipes are publicly available for comparison. When I shared my images with Shane Bernard, he wrote that he “immediately recognized the handwriting as Mary Eliza’s.”
If this post seems a little disjointed, I am aware. Think of the whole post as an orphaned footnote to some larger story. There’s simply too much to delve into in the vast Frick Family Papers, the McIlhenny and Averys, the people that these families enslaved, and of course the pre-history and rise of Tabasco Sauce, Edmund McIlhenny’s product that left an unlikely legacy. It’s a murky mix, not unlike gumbo.
Recipe:
- 1 Tablespoon lard
- 1 large onion
- 1.5 Tablespoon flour
- 1 chicken, cut in convenient pieces
- stock
- bay leaf
- thyme
- parsley
- salt
- black pepper
- 1 Tablespoon filé powder
Make a roux with a Tablespoonful of lard in which first fry a large onion and brown one and a half tablespoonfuls flour, have prepared a chicken cut in convenient pieces – fry it in the roux – cover and let it steep for a few minutes – have ready stock sufficient for serving as soup – pour over the chicken add a bay leaf, some thyme, and parsley, salt and pepper, boil until the chicken is tender, add two dozen oysters and five minutes before serving (not more) add a tablespoon of Filé. Serve with plain boiled rice.
Recipe from the Frick Family Papers, Maryland Center for History and Culture, MS 2307, Box 10