Mouton Kitchen (La Cuisine de Maison Mouton)

Gumbo has a paper trail. French writer C. C. Robin described it at a Cajun house dance on the Acadian Coast in 1803, the same year the French official Pierre Clément de Laussat ate it at a Louisiana Purchase gala in New Orleans. The historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall suggests the word comes from a Bambara term for okra. Cookbooks followed: Lafcadio Hearn in 1885, The Picayune's Creole Cookbook in 1901. On the southwestern prairies the usual gumbo is poultry with sausage, while gombo z'herbes is a meatless version of greens eaten in Lent.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vermilionville — steps away
  A living-history village of about 23 acres on Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette, opened in 1990 to interpret the Native peoples, Acadians, Creoles and people of African descent of the Attakapas region.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 5.7 mi
  Nearly 10,000 acres of bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp at the south end of Lake Martin, owned by The Nature Conservancy, with a boardwalk and a rookery of egrets, spoonbills and alligators.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 12 mi
  A bayou-side state site on former Attakapas hunting ground, with a raised Creole cottage of about 1815, a reproduction 1800 farmstead and its slave quarters, and the story behind Longfellow's Evangeline.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 12 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.

More markers nearby

• School House (L'école) — steps away
• Acadian House (Maison Acadienne) — steps away
• Beau Bassin House (La Maison Beau Bassin) — steps away
• Trappers Cabin & Boat Shed — steps away