Okra Gumbo

Gombo or gombaut migrated to the West Indies aboard slave ships and then to New Orleans and Charleston under the same circumstances. The exotic little green pods became a fixture in Southern cooking and were called okra because that’s as near as the English tongue could come to the vegetable’s native West African name, nkruma. (Gombaut is how it sounded to the French.) Anyway, okra and gumbo would be redundant except for this quirk: although Creole cooks invented