So if not bouillabaisse, where did gumbo come from? The answer can be found in its very name. In several West African languages, the word for okra is ngombo, or, in its shortened form, gombo.” Early on, the word was frequently used alongside “okra” by English writers. In the 1840s, when okra was just starting to be grown widely outside the coastal South, newspaper ads commonly offered seeds for “Okra or Gombo.” “Gombo” is still the French word for okra today.
The roots of gumbo do run deep in Louisiana. Enslaved Africans were brought to the French colony in large numbers starting in 1719, and by 1721 more than half the residents of New Orleans were African. The first known reference to gumbo as a dish was uncovered by historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, who found a handwritten transcription of the interrogation of a 50-year-old slave named Comba in New Orleans in 1764. Suspected of being associated with other slaves who had stolen clothes and a pig, Comba is asked whether she had given a slave named Louis un gombeau, and she replies that she did.
