What is Gumbo filé powder?

[Uncle Bob]

Originally Posted by mudbug

Knock me over the head with a beignet for recommending file powder in jamabalaya!

Of course it's for gumbo.

Not sure I know the word for "duh" in Cajun.

Miss Mud..I don know da word myself. I do know a couple of phases that might fit, but I want use dem here. As my man Michael in Texas say, I never seen file' powder called for in a jambalaya recipe I did see one time, many moons ago, in Church Point or either Abbeville a "local" pick up a bottle of Zatarains and sprinkle some on his jambalaya. I guess if you like the stuff you could put it on anything. In his case, and in his condition he might have put it on his chocolate cake! He was real deep into a bottle of Charter

[sparrowgrass]

Uncle Bob, when I talked about sassafras leaves being frozen off, I was referring to our horrible freeze we had Easter week.

We went from wonderful green spring, with leaves breaking out on the trees and tulips and lilacs blooming right down to 20 degrees for 3 nights in a row.

I work for Extension, and even our horticulturalists don't know what will recover and what was permanently damaged, because temps like that have never occurred in recorded history.

I have a 40 foot tulip poplar right outside my office window. Before Easter, it was leafed out and had big flower buds. Now, it has brown leaves and looks dead, dead, dead.

[oldcampcook]

Surely, y'all dig up some roots and make sassafrass tea? I grew up in MD and my momma made us drink sassafrass tea every Spring to "thin our blood." Out here in OK, they don't know of sassafrass trees. I would love to try to grow some just to see if they would survive.

Old Camp Cook

[mudbug]

Back in my Age of Aquarius days, I drank a lot of sassafras tea, oldcampcook.
Kinda liked it, as long as it had a tad of honey added.

Still don't like file powder though.