Jambalaya

by Marshall Moore

For the uninitiated, jambalaya is a rich rice-based stew with enough tomatoes, garlic, and thyme that you can feel the flavors while it’s cooking, not just smell them. The ingredients include the gastronomic holy trinity of celery, onions, and bell peppers. I’ve seen recipes that call for fish, duck, and pork, but the traditional version includes shrimp, chicken, and andouille sausage. If you can’t get your hands on andouille, substitute chorizo or kielbasa. It’s okay to use store-bought Cajun seasoning if you don’t want to make it yourself. You’ll also need paprika, chicken bouillon, maybe a bit of salt. Jambalaya (accent on the third syllable, lighter stress on the first): it’s the humble flagship of Cajun - Creole cooking, with ingredients you’re likely to have on hand already. It’s easy to make, albeit time-consuming. It will take twice as long as you expect. It will also be twice as good.

The first time I cooked jambalaya, I was living in Hong Kong. In one of the city’s upscale supermarkets that sell expats overpriced goodies from home, I found packages of andouille sausage. It wasn’t authentic, of course: it was seasoned, pre-cooked chicken, not the garlicky coarse-grained pork leftovers the real thing is made of. Even so, I started thinking: I liked jambalaya, hadn’t had it in years. Could it be that hard to make? I bought a package of the sausages, then looked online for recipes, read a few, found one I liked. Is it authentic, my partner wanted to know while I chopped. Of course, I answered, ordering my impostor syndrome to shut up. It’s authentic if I’m making it, or at least less inauthentic than the versions the restaurants in Soho are serving. Half of me’s actually from there, sort of, genetically.

Make the rice in advance: if possible, the day before. Let it cool, store it covered in the fridge overnight, and by the time you’re ready to start cooking, it should be the right consistency: on the dry side, not mushy or overly sticky. Ideally, you’ll have a rice cooker. They’re pretty foolproof. Either way, use a tiny bit less water than you normally would. The rice will absorb more when you cook it the second time. And if rice frightens you, buy two packages of the microwave kind. Jambalaya is not meant to be stressful.

That first time I cooked jambalaya, it was delicious. The second time, I cooked it at a dinner gathering for friends—or my partner’s friends, to be more specific. Hairy crabs are a delicacy in Hong Kong. That’s what we (they) were there to eat. When hairy crabs are in season, you see them neatly arranged in refrigerated racks with their legs and claws bound. The meat is delicious. There’s not that much of it. It’s a jolly, glorious mess. But since demolishing small prickly sea creatures falls into one of my culinary nope zones, I was invited to make jambalaya, which no one else present cared to try. As soon as I politely could, I went home.

If I’m working with frozen ingredients, I’ll start a few hours in advance. An easy way to defrost frozen shrimp is to immerse them in hot water, which for sanitation reasons you should change once or twice as they thaw. If the chicken’s frozen, I fill a large bowl with boiling water, cover it with a plate, and set the package on top of that. Flip it over now and then so the meat will thaw evenly. It’s not as fast as the microwave but you don’t want to cook the edges by accident. Besides, meat is easier to slice if it’s not fully thawed.

It’s hard to be nostalgic about food when there are whole categories you don’t eat. As an adult, I realized the common denominator was texture, not flavor. I have trouble explaining this to people because of all the if-then statements, loopholes, and exceptions. I don’t like being the center of attention, and people find my aversions bizarre. They don’t disguise their amazement, their disbelief. Milk in breakfast cereal, for example. The cereal turns to mush and even now as I type this, I’m shivering with revulsion as I imagine it in my mouth. I don’t eat cereal these days but if I did it would have to be dry. In general, I can’t eat mushy things, and if there’s a gritty or creamy texture in addition to the baseline goo, that’s even worse. Ergo, no ice-cream. No oatmeal. No grits. No baked goods with custard centers. In fact, nothing custard-y at all. I can force myself to eat mashed potatoes and congee if they’re not too gloppy, but it’s work. 

If you have a mortar and pestle, fresh-ground pepper will give the flavor a lift. I use pink peppercorns, Sichuan pepper, sometimes Tellicherry pepper. Just a few of each: five or six is enough. Dried thyme as well, a healthy pinch. Grind to a powder. Also, white pepper. I put it in everything. If yours is already powdered, fine; if not, grind a few peppercorns with the above. 

Nobody in Louisiana would use this blend of peppers, or maybe they would. I’ve spent time there but not as much as I’d like. Couple of visits with family in my teens, couple of spring break road trips in college, couple of trips back as an adult. On that first visit when I was a teenager, New Orleans shimmered with relevance in the early-morning sun. We ate at the Cafe du Monde and walked around the French Quarter, so different from eastern North Carolina that we might as well have been in Marrakesh or Marseille. Everything we ate on that trip was different and new. Seafood gumbo. Shrimp etouffee. Blackened fish. Po’boys. Even with all my reluctance toward food, every bite was worth chewing slowly so it would last longer. Today, New Orleans still feels like a home I’ve only visited, a path not taken. It’s a place where I could live because it’s a place where I can eat.

If you’ve cooked the rice on the day, you should stir it to break up the clumps and aerate the grains. Set out the vegetables. Have the seasonings to hand. This would be a good time to mince a few cloves of garlic if you’re using the fresh kind. Since I usually can’t be bothered, the powdered version works just as well.

‘Today, New Orleans still feels like a home I’ve only visited, a path not taken. It’s a place where I could live because it’s a place where I can eat.’

Inviting me over for dinner is not a thing you should do. I’m full of inconvenient surprises. Even if we can get past the appetizer and main course without a rethink of the menu, which I will have to approve in advance, there’s dessert. I don’t eat much sweet stuff, and I hate fruit in an asterisked way: love the flavors, loathe the textures. I find citrus sublime but don’t ask me to eat one, and please filter the pulp out of the juice. If you don’t, it feels like little blood clots hitting my tongue. I won’t be able to swallow. Ditto most berries: they taste great as long as I’m not required to eat them. I can tolerate blueberries in muffins if there aren’t too many and I can’t feel them pop when I bite. Apples are fine if they’re firm and not the kind that taste like compressed sawdust. Pineapple, I can manage. Ditto grapes, but I prefer them fermented and bottled. I like dragonfruit, oddly enough. That’s about it. There are certain fruits I can’t even stand the smell of, like bananas. The fruit’s bad enough; the peels stink like trash in a gutter. Same goes for melons and stone fruit. And when people learn you hate fruit, they worry about you. Fruit is social. Fruit is shared. To decline it is a snub, an act of heresy. I don’t enjoy being troublesome, but I can’t turn it off.

For the sauce, use a can of tomatoes, or passata. Having a complicated relationship with tomatoes, I prefer the latter. 

Tomatoes are unique: I can’t think of anything that tastes better and feels worse in my mouth. I’ve never eaten one raw and doubt I ever will. Cooked, they’re insidious: if you make pasta, there will be chunks in the sauce. This is a problem. They’re just firm enough to hold together; then you bite them and they collapse into goo. This sensation in my mouth short-circuits my brain; shockwaves of horror and disgust ripple through my body. The same thing happens with globs of fat in meat. To dispel the tremors, it sometimes helps to wave my hands around. Fat, I’ll spit out. Thus, when I cook with canned tomatoes, I use a wooden spoon and smash the chunks flat after they’ve cooked down. The firmer greenish bits where the stems were, I scoop out and discard. I can’t count the number of times I’ve eaten pasta at restaurants or friends’ homes and had to endure comments on my habit of pushing the tomatoes to one side of the dish. I can’t eat them, I explain. There’s so much I find hard to explain. Please don’t ask me to.

Chop the vegetables: a few stalks of celery, a bell pepper, then an onion. The amounts can vary according to volume and taste. I split the celery stalks down the middle because there’s no right way to do it and that’s mine. Carefully slice off any discolored bits. You might not mind eating those, but I won’t. Bell peppers are easy, even fun: I cut a circle around the stem, pull it out, rinse the inside to get rid of loose seeds, then slice it longitudinally along one of the ribs of pith. Discard the seeds and the pith, which I think is edible but which is another of those things that are never, ever going in my mouth. When you chop the onion, pull out the central bud first and discard it with the skin. And don’t feel too bad if you’re crying by now. Life is painful. Onions hurt. Be quick but careful. You don’t want to cut yourself. Once you’re done, the pain will subside.

From a distance, tear gas smells and feels like chopping onions. I know the burn well. I lived in Hong Kong during the protests. But pain and food are awful siblings, at least for me. Case in point, I can’t digest dairy. I could until college. Then one day I couldn’t. Anything made with milk or cheese would make me sick to my stomach. I went to the doctor to see if he thought I might be lactose intolerant. Stop eating cheese and find out, he said. This annoyed me. I’d just bought a block of aged white cheddar and felt guilty about throwing it away. I did it, though. I followed through. No dairy at all. My IBS didn’t clear up altogether but it abated: less cramping, less gas; fewer dashes to the bathroom. Even so, I’m always vigilant. I have to be prepared. Food is stressful.

Once you’re done with the vegetables, chop the meat. To be honest, I prefer chorizo, not andouille. It’s easier to find in this part of England and you can buy it in little packages already minced. Coarse or fine, it doesn’t matter. If you’re working with a link, chop up an amount that looks good but won’t overpower the other ingredients. The chicken comes next. I prefer thigh fillets: better flavor, less likely to dry out. If I’ve bought a package of four, I put them all in. Ditto six. If you have more than that, you should save the remaining ones. Now you’re ready to start cooking.

I moved to Asia for a number of reasons but food was high on the list. There isn’t much dairy. Having realized I like food that’s bold but usually won’t harm me, I stayed well fed and distracted: barbeque and haemul pajeon in late-night tent restaurants in the Seoulburbs accompanied by rivers of Cass beer; brilliant little skewers at izakayas in Tokyo; braised minced pork over rice in Taipei. Shanghainese dumplings at Din Tai Fung. Laksa in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Oyster omelets for breakfast in Selangor and Penang. Bento-box sushi on the shinkansen as we calmly rocketed across central Japan. Rich oden at a restaurant in Kanazawa, and far too much sake. Pork fried rice and iced coffee for breakfast in Cambodia before a day climbing temples at Angkor. Fugu, which I apparently survived. Proper dim sum in Hong Kong at restaurants the violence and crackdowns and lockdowns and mass exodus out of the city will have shuttered. This is how and where I learned to be nostalgic for food.

Pour a healthy dollop of good olive oil into a large pot. You can use other types of oil, of course, but why would you? Add the chorizo and the garlic first. I put these three ingredients in before I turn on the heat—medium seems to work best—to release the aromatics. With a wooden spoon, stir them to make sure they cook evenly. Keep an eye on them, and as soon as the garlic begins to brown, dump in the chicken and the onions. I always cook onions with meat to give them enough time to caramelize. At this point, you can add a couple of bay leaves, a big pinch of the ground pepper-thyme mixture, and some paprika. Put the lid on the pot to speed things up, but stir every few minutes so that nothing will burn. 

‘What does it mean to call a place home if you didn’t grow up there, don’t look like the locals, and don’t speak the language?’

What does it mean to be of a place but not from it? Louisiana is half of my heritage but the only part I grew up with was my father’s leftover Cajunish accent. There were tragedies and estrangements, awful secrets and long incarcerations. We didn’t talk about them. We weren’t allowed to. The old headlines were kept hidden. After the skeleton in the family closet died in Angola State Prison, my family visited Louisiana: first New Orleans, then Lafayette and Alexandria. I was 15. It was my first time there. I met cousins my age I hadn’t known existed until a few months before the trip, and I had no idea what to make of the food, so different from my mother’s pork chops and canned corn. Now and then to jazz things up, she’d open a can of pineapple chunks and spear them with those colorful party toothpicks with the little plastic tassels. She made dinners as festive as an exhausted working mom could. After the divorce, she cooked by drinking wine, putting things in the microwave, and taking them out when she remembered to. The toaster oven melted once. My father, newly single, cooked with actual spices. The food had actual flavor. It sometimes looked like scary chunks of trauma in a pot, like the aftermath of my grandfather’s crime scenes, but it was delicious. I was overjoyed and indignant. We could have grown up tasting things instead of merely sort of noticing them as we chewed.

When the chicken is about two-thirds cooked, add the celery, the bell pepper, more paprika, and another good pinch of ground pepper. If you’re using passata and the mixture looks dry, pour a little more in. Liquid from the canned tomatoes can be used for this purpose too. At this stage, I’d toss in a cube of chicken bouillon as well as a couple of tablespoons of Cajun seasoning. Stir everything to distribute the spices, then cover and reduce the heat very slightly. Also, break up the clumps of rice if you haven’t done that already: mash it with a wooden spoon or squeeze the packets if you’re using the microwave kind.

What does it mean to call a place home if you didn’t grow up there, don’t look like the locals, and don’t speak the language? Home in the original sense was a place I had to escape. Later, home was a place I recognized at the subatomic level but never lived. In my late 40s, I’d found a new home, decided to stay, and then had to escape. Home became the things I took with me, or shipped.

The ideal time to add the rest of the passata (or the tomatoes) is when the chicken’s about 90% done. You don’t want to overcook anything, but there’s little risk of that. Jambalaya will forgive you. It wants to exist. If you’ve gotten this far and haven’t scorched the food, you’re good to go. One can of tomatoes or passata should be enough. Add the rice a bit at a time, and stir. That’s easier than dumping it all in at once. Remember, this is a stew, not a soup, so you’ll need enough moisture to soften the rice but not so much that it turns into mush. Toss in more Cajun seasoning if you like. The color is a good indicator: if the mixture’s still too red, you need to balance out the tomatoes with more seasoning. Give it one final stir. Put the lid on. Turn the heat down. On a gas stove, it should be as low as the flame will go without snuffing out. On an induction hob, maybe 2. Let it simmer. Once the meat’s cooked and you’re sure nothing’s burned, it’s done when you want it to be. Turn the heat off. Let it cool. Ladle it into big bowls. 

I struggle with authenticity. I struggle with my heritage. I struggle with food. People with different biographies and biologies get to enjoy these things instead of enduring them. Jambalaya is easy. It’s my version of home. My gumbo’s good too.