It should come as no surprise, then, that gumbo, New Orleans’s most famous Creole creation, has a rather complex pedigree. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word “gumbo” to the Angolan term kingombo, which means “okra” (also an African word). Although some historians have speculated that the word may derive from the Choctaw word kombo, which means “sassafras,” the African origin is the most accepted. The term also refers to a French patois spoken in the West Indies and a separate French dialect used in Louisiana (also called black Creole), but gumbo has come to signify for Americans the rich soup for which Louisiana is famous.
