Meet Jimmy Buffett’s ‘rebel’ sister, Lucy. She makes a mean gumbo.

To make a gumbo is to tell a story, one that flows from the soul and takes hold of each ingredient you drop into the pot. This is how Lucy “LuLu” Buffett, Gulf Coast restaurant owner, cookbook author and “rebel” sister of superstar Jimmy Buffett, makes her signature dish.

She describes the act of making gumbo as a kind of ritual that spirits her memories, hopes and intentions into the deep simmer. Gumbo takes its time. She knows this – but try telling it to those who crave a steaming bowl right then and there.

“Can you just toss together a gumbo?” she recalls her musician brother asking once during a sibling reunion in the Florida Keys.

“Toss together?” she came back.

One does not toss together gumbo. One nurtures it, says Lucy Buffett, author of the newly released cookbook, “Gumbo Love: Recipes for Gulf Coast Cooking, Entertaining, and Savoring the Good Life” (Grand Central Life & Style, $29.99).

Gumbo was the dish simmering on Buffett’s paternal grandmother’s stove in her Mississippi home each Friday as part of the weekend spread of Southern favorites. Buffett would visit at least once a month with her siblings, brother Jimmy (the eldest) and sister Laurie (the middle child). As Lucy Buffett describes in her book, “the smell would wind its way out of the kitchen and down the driveway to greet us in a welcoming cloud” that led to her grandmother’s kitchen.

“Gumbo became my specialty,” the ebullient author said by phone in a recent interview. “It evolved as a philosophy. Learning to cook gumbo, it makes you rely on character-building traits like patience and starting over when you fail. It’s all there in the gumbo.”

It’s no surprise that gumbo is the best-selling dish at Buffett’s restaurant, LuLu’s, in Gulf Shores, Alabama. It’s certainly her big brother’s most requested dish there, she says.

“Honest to God, when Jimmy comes to my restaurant, he orders gumbo. He loves gumbo. He can get anything else anywhere else. But he can’t get a good gumbo just anywhere,” says Buffett, who lives just across the Alabama/Florida state line in Perdido Key, Florida.

At family gatherings, she pairs the gumbo with a simple West Indies-style salad of jumbo lump blue crab meat, slivered Vidalia onions, oil and vinegar. That dish, she can “just toss together.”

The gumbo is another story.

It involves brewing up fresh shrimp stock, nudging a roux into its proper flavor depths, scalding the skins off tomatoes, whisking together a signature spice blend – and then there’s that step that involves filling an empty soda bottle and freezing it. (It helps cool the stock later.)

But once the simmer deepens and the great meld of flavors is on, the pot begins to sputter its truths. For Buffett, they are reflections of her “late-blooming” success after “all that inner work you do to be an empowered woman,” she says.

“For me, cooking is a meditation. Cooking is therapy. In the South, when somebody dies, you cook. When somebody gets a promotion, or has a baby, you cook. It’s my place. It’s my art form, just like writing a song or writing a book is an art form,” say Buffett, who describes her younger self as “wild and crazy and a rebel.”

She was the sister who married young and had her two daughters “very young.” After her (also young) marriage ended, she packed up her girls in her Ford Mustang and headed to Key West, where they moved into brother Jimmy’s apartment, she writes. Not only did Jimmy live next to the iconic Louie’s Backyard, he knew where to find the good grub. Lucy Buffett’s “WOW moment in food” happened over bouillabaisse at a Duval Street French restaurant, a flip-flops-appropriate place serving fancy food.

For Buffett, it was the start of a love affair with the Key West lifestyle and its cooking passions. Before she opened her first restaurant out of a bait shop café in Weeks Bay, Alabama, there would be many culinary adventures, including cooking for Harrison Ford on a yacht around Belize, creating wedding feasts in New York City and working weekend catering gigs in L.A.

But when the gumbo of her life came together, she came to realize cooking was more than a gig, says Buffett, who divides her time between her homes in Perdido Key and Key West.

“In the family, everyone has a thing that they do. My sister is a cowgirl and Jimmy’s a musician, and I cook,” she says. “Now it’s kind of cliché. You find your passion and gravitate to it.”

The following recipes and author’s text are reprinted from Lucy Buffett’s “Gumbo Love” cookbook with permission of the publisher, Grand Central Life & Style. 

Recipes

Lucy's Signature Summer Seafood Gumbo

Over the years, this is the recipe that I’ve cooked the most and that has remained a featured specialty at my restaurants. As far as the seafood goes, I use shrimp and crab, but if it’s cool enough for oysters and there are some sweet and pretty ones available, or it’s crawfish season, I will toss those in, too. And though I usually use only sausage in my winter gumbo, it’s no crime to add a little andouille to the pot as well. – Lucy Buffett 

Serves 14 to 16 

Gumbo ingredients 

3 pounds medium wild-caught Gulf shrimp, heads on

2 pounds cooked blue crab claw meat, picked through for shells, handled carefully to keep the meat in big chunks

4 large ripe tomatoes, or 1 (28-ounce) can whole tomatoes with their juices

¾ cup vegetable oil or bacon grease

1 cup all-purpose flour

2 large onions, coarsely chopped

1 bunch celery, coarsely chopped, including leaves

2 green bell peppers, coarsely chopped

8 cups shrimp or seafood stock (recipe below), heated

2 to 3 teaspoons sea salt, or to taste

1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

2 tablespoons dried thyme

4 bay leaves

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon dried basil

2 tablespoons LuLu’s Crazy Creola Seasoning (recipe below), or other Creole seasoning

¼ cup hot sauce

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

4 blue crab bodies, if available (optional)

2½ pounds fresh okra, chopped into ¼-inch pieces, or thawed frozen cut okra

2 cups finely chopped green onions

½ cup finely chopped fresh parsley

½ cup fresh lemon juice

Cooked white rice, for serving

French bread and butter, for serving

Make the gumbo 

1. Peel and devein the shrimp. (If you’re making your own stock, reserve the heads and shells to make the stock.) Refrigerate the shrimp and crabmeat until ready to use.

2. If using fresh tomatoes, fill a medium saucepan with water. Bring to a boil. Carefully drop the tomatoes into the boiling water and cook for 1 minute. Remove with a slotted spoon and let them cool. The skins will slip off easily. Remove the cores and coarsely chop the tomatoes over a bowl to retain as much juice as possible. Set aside. (If using canned tomatoes, chop each tomato into eighths and return them to the juice in the can.)

3. To make the roux, in a large stockpot (about 10 quarts), heat the vegetable oil over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, gradually add the flour, whisking continuously, and cook, stirring and adjusting the heat as necessary to keep it from burning, until the roux is a dark mahogany color, 25 to 35 minutes. Be careful: if the roux burns, you will have to start all over again!

4. Carefully add the onion to the roux and stir with a large wooden spoon for 2 to 3 minutes. (The onion will sizzle and steam when it hits the hot roux, so caution is advised. All seasoned gumbo cooks have roux battle scars on one or both arms.)

5. Add the celery and cook, stirring continuously, for 2 to 3 minutes.

6. Add the bell pepper and cook, stirring continuously, for 2 to 3 minutes more. The mixture should resemble a pot of black beans in color and texture.

7. Add the heated stock and the tomatoes with their juices. Stir in the salt, black pepper, cayenne, thyme, bay leaves, oregano, basil, Creole seasoning, hot sauce, and Worcestershire sauce. Stir well. Bring the gumbo to a boil and cook for 5 minutes, then reduce the heat to maintain a slow simmer. Add the crab bodies (if using) and simmer, uncovered, for about 1 hour.

8. Add the okra and bring the gumbo to a boil. Cook for 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to maintain a slow simmer and cook, uncovered, for 30 minutes, or until the okra has lost its bright green color and cooked down like the other vegetables. If the gumbo gets too thick, add a little water. If it is too thin, continue to simmer it, uncovered.

9. Gumbo is always better the day after it has been cooked, although I’ve never had a complaint when I served it the day I made it. At this point, you can cool the gumbo. Turn off the heat and let it sit for about 30 minutes. Then place the pot, uncovered, in an empty sink. Fill the sink with cold water and ice around the stockpot (try not to get any in the stockpot itself). Stir every 15 minutes to facilitate cooling. When completely cool, refrigerate the gumbo in the stockpot, uncovered.

10. When ready to serve, slowly bring the gumbo to a simmer over medium-low heat. Thirty minutes before serving, add the green onion, parsley, and lemon juice to the gumbo. Cover and cook for 15 minutes. Add the shrimp and crabmeat, mix well, and cook for 2 minutes. Cover and turn off the heat. Let it sit for at least 15 minutes more to cook the seafood. The gumbo will stay hot for a long time. Remove and discard the bay leaves. Taste and adjust the seasonings; serve over cooked white rice with French bread and butter.

Shrimp Stock

If you are lucky enough to get shrimp with the heads on, rejoice. Shrimp heads make the stock even richer and more flavorful. – Lucy Buffett 

Makes about 4 quarts 

Ingredients 

Heads, tails, and shells from about 5 pounds peeled wild-caught Gulf shrimp

6 quarts water

2 lemons, sliced into ¼-inch rounds

2 bay leaves

3 onions, coarsely chopped

6 celery stalks, coarsely chopped

1 bunch green onions, coarsely chopped

Handful of fresh parsley with stems, washed thoroughly

1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns

1 whole garlic clove

White wine

Make the stock 

1. At least several hours before you plan to make the stock, fill a clean, empty 1-liter soda bottle with water to about 2 inches from the top, seal, and freeze it.

2. Run cold water over the shrimp shells to rinse. Place all the ingredients in a medium stockpot. Bring to a boil over high heat.

3. Reduce the heat to medium, or until the stock is simmering. Skim off the foam that rises to the top. Cook for a couple of hours, skimming again about every 15 minutes.

4. Place the stockpot in an empty sink. Fill the sink with water and ice around the stockpot. Let the stock cool completely, uncovered. When the stock has cooled down a bit, about 30 minutes or so, put the frozen soda bottle in the middle to cool the stock from the inside out. Strain the stock, discarding the solids, transfer to storage containers, and refrigerate or freeze immediately.

Lulu’s Crazy Creola Seasoning

Makes ½ cup

Ingredients

1 tablespoon sea salt

2 tablespoons granulated garlic or garlic powder

4 teaspoons granulated onion or onion powder

¼ cup paprika

1½ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper

2 teaspoons cayenne pepper

2 teaspoons white pepper

½ teaspoon dried thyme

½ teaspoon dried oregano

Combine all the ingredients and store in an airtight container.

Classic Southern Pound Cake with Strawberries

“Southern pound cake – it’s the first thing I learned to cook,” author Lucy Buffett told us in a recent interview. “Anybody in the South who went to their grandmother’s house knows, there was always a cake, some kind of cake, and something on the stove.

“I like real cake. I like creamy and vanilla, so I like pound cake. With this cake, you almost want to undercook it a little bit. It’s buttery and hot and when it comes out of the oven. When anyone takes a bite of it, they just groan.”

Serves 12 to 16 

Ingredients 

1½ cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus more for the pan

3 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for the pan

3 cups plus 2 tablespoons sugar

3 cups sliced fresh strawberries

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon sea salt

5 large eggs, at room temperature

1 cup whole milk

2½ teaspoons vanilla extract (or use almond or any other flavored extract)

Fresh whipped cream (recipe follows), for garnish

Make the cake 

1. Preheat the oven to 325°F. Butter and flour a 10-inch tube pan (a tube pan is preferred, but if you use a Bundt pan instead, you’ll need to make sure to leave 1 inch of space at the top of the pan, so you may end up with a small amount of leftover batter).

2. Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of the sugar over the sliced strawberries. Cover and refrigerate until ready to serve the cake.

3. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt and set aside.

4. In a large bowl, beat the butter on medium speed with an electric mixer until creamy. Add the remaining 3 cups sugar, ½ cup at a time, and beat until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.

5. Reduce the mixer speed to low and alternate adding the flour mixture and the milk, starting and finishing with the flour mixture. Add the vanilla and mix to incorporate.

6. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool in the pan on a wire rack for 15 minutes, then turn the cake out onto the rack to cool completely. Serve each piece with a spoonful of the chilled strawberries and a dollop of fresh whipped cream.

Fresh whipped cream

Ingredients 

1 cup heavy cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract or

flavored liqueur

3 tablespoons sugar

Whip it up 

1. Place a medium metal bowl in the freezer to chill.

2. When ready to prepare the whipped cream, place the cream and vanilla in the chilled bowl. With an electric mixer, whip the cream on medium speed, gradually adding the sugar. The cream will begin to thicken.

3. Whip the cream until it begins to form stiff peaks. Be careful not to overwhip or the cream will separate.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Meet Jimmy Buffett’s ‘rebel’ sister, Lucy. She makes a mean gumbo.