Ask any self-respecting Louisianan who makes the best gumbo as well as the reply is general: ‘Momma.’ The merchandise of the melting pot of culinary affects, gumbo, in fact, reflects the variety of the people who cooked it up: France aristocrats, Western Africans in bondage, Cajun refugees, German settlers, Native Americans-all had a hand in the pot. What is it about gumbo that is constantly on the delight and nourish a lot of? And what clarifies its spread around the world?

A seasoned journalist, Ken Wells about Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou sleuths out the answers. His obsession goes back to his childhood in the Cajun bastion of Bayou Black. In the past, gumbo was a humble soup small known beyond the boundaries of Louisiana. So when a homesick youthful Ken, at college in Missouri, recognized there wasn’t a restaurant that could fulfill his gumbo yearnings, he known as his momma for the formula. That phone-taught gumbo was a disaster. The second, cooked at his mother’s side, fueled a lifelong search to explore gumbo’s origins and mysteries.

In Gumbo Lifestyle, you follow Wells as he watches octogenarian chefs turn the lowly coot into premium gumbo, joins a team at a hotly contested gumbo cook-off, and visits a factory that churns out gumbo from the ton. Brisk travelogue, riveting history, heart-felt memoir-this is definitely a book to be savored like a simmering container of gumbo.