Seafood Gumbo

The song was a big hit in 1952, especially in the decountrified cover by Jo Stafford with the Norman Luboff Choir, hitting number 3 on the Billboard pop chart. Only a few grinches criticized Williams’s fractured Cajun French. But did anyone notice the biggest barbarism in his lyrics, that gastronomic hippogriff “filé gumbo”?

A gumbo is a soup of Cajun Louisiana thickened either by okra (gumbo) or by filé, the po