Just as she promised, Marcia Ball cooked up “emergency gumbo and shrimp remoulade”— for those days when you just don’t have time to labor over the stove—at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. She did all the work in 15 minutes, then just had to wait another 15 for the flavors to meld.

Here’s what you need on hand:

1 cup flour
1 cup oil
2 big onions
1 green pepper
some garlic
4 boxes chicken broth
2 rotisserie chickens (already cooked)
2 bay leaves
green onions for garnish
parsley
salt
pepper
cayenne pepper

The flour and oil are for the roux, a thickening agent. It can take a good 30 minutes  to stir that flour and oil in a pan until it reduces to a rich brown hue. And it takes a lot of elbow grease. So you have permission to cheat. Ball reports that her brother was waiting in line at a Lafayette, Louisiana, post office and listening to the other waitees talk about food. And they all used roux from a jar. (Google “bottled roux,” and there it is!) “I guarantee that restaurants do it, too,” said Ball. “And you can’t tell the difference.”

In a large pot, she poured some of that chicken broth, and added the chopped onion and green pepper. She didn’t add tomatoes because she just doesn’t like them in her gumbo. She added the bay leaves and both rotisserie chickens, but no hot sauce because “It’s not my goal to burn people out.” You could add some small slices of okra, which also acts as a thickener.
As the minutes ticked by, Ball added a dash of cayenne pepper, some black pepper and salt. She did have a helper on hand preparing roux from scratch, which she added toward the end.

At one point she plucked out a chicken bone and noted, “People who’ve never eaten gumbo are sometimes shocked by bones in the soup.”

You can add oysters or sausage at the end, if you want. Voila: 30-minute gumbo! All you need to go with it is some long-grain rice. “To make it pretty,” sprinkle some chopped green onions and parsley on the top.

Then the lanky songstress prepared an even speedier shrimp remoulade.

She took a plate of lettuce and added some slices of avocado. “This avocado probably cost $5,” she noted. “It’s the most beautiful avocado I’ve ever seen.”

She piled some steamed shrimp atop the green bed.

She took a jar and filled it with ingredients for the dressing:

1 cup vegetable oil
1/3 to 1/2 cup vinegar
1 jar creole mustard (which is dense and brown but wasn’t around, so she used stone ground instead)
2 tablespoons paprika
some finely chopped onion and garlic
horseradish (optional)
Tabasco sauce (although “you don’t have to”)

Then she screwed the lid on the jar. “I don’t have a food processor,” Ball said. So she shook that jar with some serious hip motion and sang, “Shake it up baby, come on twist and shout.”

Hmm, the dressing looked a little thin. Maybe she should have used less oil.

To compensate, she added more mustard. The dressing looked good. Her advice: “Don’t skimp on the mustard. It’s the predominant flavor.”

Also: “Salt and pepper wouldn’t hurt it.” And just for good measure, she added a heaping teaspoon of horseradish.

The dressing was a beautiful shade of tan. She poured it on the plate of lettuce, avocado, and shrimp. And there you have it:
Shrimp remoulade!

If you want to try Ball’s girlhood dessert, take some buttered white bread and dip it in a saucer full of syrup. “Boy, I feel old,” she said, describing the sweet treat. “It’s like from another world.”

Oh, and no matter what you cook, you might want to follow the advice of a friend of Ball’s mother. If asked for a recipe, she’d always say, “First you wash your hands.”

Ball closed her session with a joke that shows how Cajuns will cook just about anything. Two Cajuns see a UFO land, and some odd-looking creature gets out. One Cajun asks, “Now what’s that?”

The other one says, “I don’t know, but make some rice.”

- Marc Silver

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