Filé 411

The simple answer is that filé is a seasoning and thickener made from ground sassafras leaves. Filé gumbo is gumbo seasoned with filé, and gumbo filé is another name for the ingredient itself. Recipes involving filé appear in the earliest Creole cookbooks, and references to both the dish and the ingredient can be found in records from the French and Spanish colonial eras. At one point filé was a common export overseas—colonists would send bottles of it to friends and relatives as gifts.

Filé, okra, and roux all provide flavor and body to gumbo, but their histories are as different as their applications. Roux is a French European import and stands today as the absolute square one of any gumbo. Okra comes from West Africa, where it is called gombo, and was brought to Louisiana by enslaved people, who incorporated its cultivation and preparation into the colony’s food ways. Filé came from Native Americans in the region, whose horticultural knowledge, agricultural skills, and trade routes pulled the colony and its people from the brink of starvation more than once. How these three ingredients and their preparations interacted and iterated over the centuries remains one of the great feats of creolization, a perfect symbol for the cultural blending that has made Cajun and Creole food so unique—and delicious.

Today, common wisdom holds that okra pairs best with seafood gumbo, and filé is better for gumbos involving game, poultry, and rabbit. More than one cookbook advises never to use both in the same gumbo. “If you do, you might find yourself using the gumbo as mortar between bricks,” writes John DeMers in the cookbook New Orleans by the Bowl (2003). Filé is meant to be added at the end of cooking or seasoned to taste individually. Letting it boil will result in the gumbo turning stringy, or “ropey,” as locals describe it.

Cajun Chef, Zatarain’s (now owned by McCormick), and Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Magic Seasoning Blends all produce filé. Though sales are mostly limited to the region, according to Magic Seasoning Blends CEO Marty Cosgrove, outliers exist, such as a northern California bubble that makes up a “decent amount of sales.” “Something tells me there are some Louisiana natives making gumbo in northern California!” he says.

To most, filé is seen as an optional gumbo add-on, but in the Cane River region of central Louisiana, where sassafras grows wild, it’s necessary. “Natchitoches Parish, Cane River area, that’s the hotbed of gumbo filé,” says Dusty Fuqua, an anthropologist and culture bearer known as the Filé Man. “They say it’s about the taste—taste all day. It’s hard to keep it in stock sometimes. It’s very regional.” In addition to foraging, processing, and selling filé, Fuqua gives demonstrations to increase public awareness of this part of the region’s heritage.

Fuqua grew up near sassafras country, in Avoyelles Parish, a forested area south of Alexandria named for the Avoyel tribe. Trained as an anthropologist, he learned to forage sassafras from John Oswald Colson, the original Filé Man. Colson was a Cane River Creole and carried the filé tradition for decades, demonstrating its preparation at festivals and in schools. Fuqua worked as his apprentice, driving Colson “all over the place” to forage and helping to secure a permit to gather leaves in Kisatchie National Forest. “It’s something that’s passed down,” Fuqua says of Colson’s filé wisdom. “You can’t pick up a book about it, go to a website. It’s a traditional apprentice relationship.”

Based on his travels and talks with practitioners in the region, Fuqua estimates that there are still a couple hundred families carrying on the filé tradition. When Colson died, in 2013, “there was a big void to fill, and I stepped up,” he says. “I’m holding the mantel, keeping it warm, but I’m looking to have his two grandsons take over when they get a little older.”

Sassafras albidum is a member of the laurel family native to the eastern United States and found across that part of the country as well as in parts of Canada. “Sassafras is an understory type of tree,” Fuqua explains. “In Louisiana, it grows predominantly in mixed bottomland pine forest.” Despite filé’s cultural association with the Cajun and Creole food of south Louisiana, the tree it comes from does not grow in the coastal regions of the state, including greater New Orleans. Native Americans utilized virtually all parts of the tree—from the roots and leaves to the pith, or soft interior, of the branches—for various medicinal uses. In Louisiana, these peoples would have included the Choctaw, Houma, Tunica, Avoyel-Taensa, and Biloxi.

Settlers during the French and Spanish colonial eras describe Natives working the leaves into a poultice to draw out splinters and ingrown hairs or heal boils, stings, and bruises. The roots, likewise, could be boiled and made into a poultice for treating legions. Sassafras tea, made from the boiled bark of the roots, was used as a tonic or “blood purifier” thanks to safrole, an organic compound in sassafras that acts as a blood thinner. According to the US Department of Agriculture, other medicinal uses have included treatment for rheumatism, cough, tapeworms, and more. These uses were documented among Anglo Americans and Appalachians, as well, Fuqua notes.

The roots of kombo ashish (the Choctaw term for sassafras) are typically harvested in the winter, “when the sap has settled down into the ground,” Fuqua says. Its soft but punchy, sweet flavor has been used in teas and beverages for centuries. Boil it, add sugar, and ferment it, and you get root beer—though today, you won’t find sassafras-derived root beer in any store. In the mid-20th century, safrole was found to be carcinogenic in high doses. The FDA banned it in for human consumption in 1960, though its use survives among traditional Indigenous gardeners. (Fun fact: safrole—C₁₀H₁₀O₂—is also a main ingredient in MDMA, and a molecular relative of it, isosafrole, is used in perfumery for its spicy, licorice-like scent.)

The leaves of the sassafras tree, dried and ground into a fine power, bring us filé. The term comes from the French word for leaf, feuille, but its use as a thickener for soups and stews far predates European contact. What would those Indigenous dishes have looked like? Fuqua notes that before the arrival of pigs to the region in the mid-16th century, bear fat would have been the most common cooking fat, with meat coming from ducks, rabbits, or bears and any number of foraged or cultivated plants rounding it all out. Kombo ashish would help bind everything together.

Fuqua describes filé’s taste as bright, citrusy, and vegetal. “It’s funny,” he says. “Most of the people my age I talk to, they say, ‘Wow, this smells like Froot Loops!’” Central to achieving this fruity flavor is proper harvesting and processing. Fuqua typically forages during the height of the deciduous tree’s growing season, starting in May or June, making sure not to harvest too many branches from a single tree. “There’s places around like Cane River Lake where it does not grow anymore because it’s been overharvested,” he says. “People will go out with a cane knife or a machete and just cut down a whole tree. It’s very insensitive.”

After gathering branches, Fuqua will strip the leaves from them, even removing the stems of the leaves to get the softest, freshest parts for the filé. The leaves are stored in large sanitary containers to dry for six weeks. Fuqua aerates the leaves every day by gently turning them over.

Once dried, the leaves are ready for the pilé et pilon, a large, wooden mortar and pestle used for grinding. Pilé comes from the French verb piler, which means to crush. The piléed filé is soft, almost fluffy, and bright, rich green. “You can’t get filé this green in the grocery store,” says Fuqua, who likes to sprinkle his filé on top of a central dome of rice surrounded by a steaming moat of gumbo. “As you eat it, you work the filé into the gumbo with every bite.”