Mondo Knows Facts
Gumbo can be thickened with sassafras leaf
Ground dried leaves called filé are stirred in at the end to bind the pot Filé powder is made from young sassafras leaves, dried and ground by Choctaw people and later adopted into Louisiana cooking. It thickens by swelling in hot liquid, so it is added off the heat at the end, since boiling makes it stringy. Many gumbos instead use okra or a dark roux as the thickener. It sits in Mondo's food collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Tags: gumbo, sassafras, louisiana
Gumbo can be thickened with sassafras leaf: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Ground dried leaves called filé are stirred in at the end to bind the pot. The figure is taken from Smithsonian Institution, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a food fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Food shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.