Friday is Gumbo Day in New Orleans

In these northern environs, gumbo is a dish that many think of but once a year, as a marker of the pre-Lent celebration of Mardi Gras.

But down in New Orleans, where gumbo is the most important dish in the Louisiana lexicon, most restaurants serve some version of it year round - at least once a week.

For Friday is gumbo day in scores of New Orleans restaurants, and many comply with the Lenten restrictions, preparing it without meat.

One of NOLA's best gumbo haunts, Dunbar's Creole Cooking, flooded badly following Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and has since relocated to the cafeteria space at Loyola University's law school.

The unexpected change of venue did little to fetter Dunbar's repertoire, which has always been short on pretension and long on soul: red beans and rice with fried chicken, smothered okra and shrimp, seafood-stuffed bell peppers, crawfish etouffée.

But Lent interferes where a devastating hurricane did not. This week, Miss Celestine Dunbar and her staff will leave the andouille, the smoked sausage, and the chicken out of their standard Friday gumbo.

"We only put the shrimp, crabmeat, crabs and whatever kind of seafood-oysters - and still make the same stock . . . everything but the meat," Miss Dunbar told me.

In a city such as New Orleans, which enjoys the Gulf of Mexico as its backyard (more so now than ever, sadly), an all-seafood gumbo is hardly a hunger sentence.

In fact, meatless seafood gumbos are the norm in other parts of the state. John Laudun, a folklorist specializing in material folk culture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, says that his father's all-seafood gumbo is still the "high-water mark" in his life.

"We were from St. Mary's Parish (a coastal area), so seafood is more of a tradition there. I can say this: You know most people think of sausage as being an integral part of a lot of gumbos, but in my household if a shadow of a sausage passed over the gumbo pot, that gumbo was spoiled in my dad's imagination," Laudun says.

Unlike prairie-style gumbos, which may contain any meat available, from hen to wild duck to squirrel, gumbos based on seafood tend to be special-occasion dishes even where the ingredients are easily obtained.

As Miss Dunbar put it: "Gumbo has always been an expensive dish. A lot of people think gumbo is - just take it lightly. But gumbo is a process. If you make a real gumbo, the right ingredients, you're going to spend some money."

Fortunately, there exists no rulebook for proper gumbo-making, no matter how many gumbo cooks tell you that their way, or their mama's way, is the only way (and they will tell you so). It's possible, and deeply satisfying, to stretch your gumbo's other ingredients to increase its flavor dimensions when finances are an issue.

Besides making a hearty stock, the best place to start building flavor in gumbo is with a roux. Best, too, to approach the roux as its own project, rather than simply one in a series of recipe steps.

Vital tools for successful roux-making: a heavy-bottomed pot, long sleeves, and patience. A little luck won't hurt.

Not every gumbo contains roux. Some gumbo cooks use okra and/or filé (the cured and ground leaves of the sassafras tree) as flavoring and thickening agents instead. Most Louisiana cooks claim that mixing the three willy-nilly is culinary sacrilege.

The final component, no matter what style of gumbo you're making, is the background seasonings. Some combination of the vegetal holy trinity - celery, onion and green bell pepper - usually serves as a seasoning base. It's traditional in most restaurants and households to season later with salt, peppers (black, red, and/or white), bay leaf, parsley, and green onions.

The Uzee family, makers of the seafood gumbo at the annual French Food Festival in coastal Larose, boosts the flavor of theirs with clam juice and liquid crab boil. Seasoning seafood gumbo is a matter of tradition, and also of personal preference.

Perhaps the only imperative: Whatever the season, you shouldn't be able to taste any sacrifice.