Thanksgiving has turkey. Chanukah has latkes. Christmas, ham. What about New Year’s?
No matter what your “fun” aunt insists, champagne is not a meal. It’s a cold, too-sweet beverage, tolerated for its bubbles. New Year’s is my favorite holiday, and it deserves something delicious. Something warm and exciting and filling. Thankfully, one of the America’s warmest, most exciting cities can lead the way: New Orleans. New Year’s deserves gumbo.
Gumbo is so intertwined with New Year’s in Louisiana that after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans changed its midnight-countdown icon from a New Year’s baby to a papier-mâché gumbo pot; for three years, the gumbo pot dropped down a 25-foot flag pole in Jackson Square. (In 2008, the pot was replaced with giant a fleur de lis as a symbol of post-Katrina rebirth.) The word gumbo also originates from the language of slaves who first populated the region and cooked the dish. Ki ngombo is the word for okra in Bantu, and although some incorrectly claim that the soup is a variation on French bouillabaisse—a dish South-ified by the blacks in French Louisiana—the reverse is closer to the truth. As Robert Moss noted in his sprawling piece on the stew for Serious Eats, gumbo’s original recipes called for chicken and pork, and it was French settlers who fancified it with upscale (and OK, delicious) oysters and shellfish. Like Louisiana itself, the meal is soaked in colonialism, slavery, and conflict.
All of this recommends serving it on a day that marks a full, fraught year. New Year’s is not just a holiday for some. It’s for everybody, a holiday that people can make their own. If you like parties, what could be better than a full, complex bowl from the city that houses the French Quarter? If you like quiet, simple pleasures with your honey, why not enjoy a toasty bowl of stew together on a chilly winter day? If you think the year has been a slog to endure, see how long it takes you to cook your first pot of gumbo, and how much work it might take to eat if you keep the shells on the shrimp or lobster you throw in.
My friend Jillian in Chicago comes from a creole family, and her family’s gumbo was the first I was lucky enough to eat, on New Year’s or any day. Her family spends two days cooking enough gumbo for more than 20 people, though she says many creole families start cooking it even earlier, right after Christmas, with that holiday’s leftover turkey and ham. Jillian’s family gumbo contains chicken, pork, beef, Andouille, shrimp, crab, lobster, and sometimes oysters. It’s redder than some browner varieties, since it eschews flour as a thickening agent, but it does contain filé, a sassafras spice that also thickens things. Her gumbo is always served with rice, never corn. “Those people are weird,” Jillian says.
New Year’s inherently makes us look backward as well as forward. 2016 has been the worst, but the relative merits of any year are up for debate, even this one. An ideal New Year’s meal should hold as much variety and viscera within it as the year itself—and gumbo does.
On New Year’s Eve of 2007, I was sitting in my apartment with my friend Kenny and then-friend, now-wife Tiffany with nothing to do. At the time, I was studying abroad in Paris, and they were visiting during winter break. This was supposed to be the apex of their trip, but my pals from school had fled the city. There was no party; we had no plans. We were three 20-year-old Americans in Europe with champagne, desperate for somewhere to go.
Around 11:30 p.m., we said fuck it and headed to the Eiffel Tower. By the time we climbed the crowded stairs of the Métro, the countdown was underway. Soon champagne corks were popping, fireworks were flying, and we were jumping onto a moving carousel, champagne bottles in hand. Along the riverbank, we met some French and German students who invited us back to their apartment for drinking and dancing and a pale American guy in a Russian hat who kept joyously shouting “Bonne Pâcques!” (“Happy Easter!”) Tiffany and I wound up having a massive fight, and later, sleeping in each others’ arms. It was the kind of night particularly possible in one’s early 20s, and particularly apropos for New Year’s Eve.
Not every New Year’s can seem so special—but it is. If taken earnestly, it offers an opportunity for self-examination and a recommitment to self-improvement. It can be sloppy or intimate, joyous or melancholy. The holiday deserves a delicious, difficult meal that can embody all this. Gumbo provides comfort on a cold day, it cures hangovers, and it can feed a house. So come 2017, forget champagne. Take a cup of kindness yet, and slurp some gumbo.
