USDA just changed its definition of jambalaya—with a little help from Leah Chase

Regulations don’t move as fast as culture, though, often not keeping pace with the changing meanings of food. But here’s one instance where they actually did: jambalaya.

Last week, the USDA announced it would remove the term from its labeling book altogether, effectively allowing manufacturers to claim that a much wider swath of products are, in fact, jambalaya. In a public letter, Roberta Wagner, an agency administrator, wrote that any product could be labeled jambalaya as long as its contents were 3 percent meat and 2 percent poultry, and that the names of those meats were included in the name.

And how did that happen? With a little help from the late Leah Chase, the beloved owner of Dooky Chase, a legendary New Orleans Creole restaurant. Her death on Saturday, at 96 years old, has spurred a wave of tributes, from newspapers to acclaimed chefs, and even from Barack Obama, one of many political icons to have tried her famous gumbo.

Chase, as it turned out, wrote a letter of support in a 2013 petition that beseeched the USDA to change their tune. The petition was created by the influential New Orleans food company, Zatarain’s, now owned by spice giant McCormick. Zatarain’s dates back to the late 1800s, and originally was best known for its Creole mustard and root beer. Since 1985, the company has sold boxed rice mixes—dirty rice, Gumbo mix, and jambalaya—in grocery stores. Arguably, Zatarain’s introduced jambalaya to much of America—or at least, to those Americans who experience culture through the supermarket. To this day, the company sells the country’s most popular jambalaya mixes.

Evidently, it had been doing that well enough for almost 30 years. But when Zatarain’s submitted a request to sell a sausage-flavored jambalaya, the USDA rejected it. Since the 1970s, jambalaya has meant just one specific thing to the agency, according to spokesperson Buck McKay. In its labeling policy book, the entry for jambalaya describes “a New Orleans dish involving rice and ham and usually tomatoes,” containing “at least 25 percent cooked ham” and one other meat or seafood.  

That’s not (necessarily) what jambalaya is, Zatarain’s responded in a public petition. It’s true that jambalaya often includes ham. Jambon, the French word for the stuff, is right there in the name. But it doesn’t have to be fully a quarter of the dish. In fact, the company wrote, it encouraged customers who bought their mix to throw in smoked sausage, chicken, or shrimp.

Plus, tomatoes aren’t always in jambalaya. They’re a defining feature of Creole jambalaya, a style that’s historically more popular in New Orleans. But traditionally, outside the city, in rural Louisiana, Cajun jambalaya is made sans tomatoes, and has a deeper, browner color from caramelizing the vegetables. The difference isn’t insignificant, because jambalaya isn’t just a recipe. Depending on where it’s being cooked, it’s an expression of different peoples, different cultures, and more broadly, a legacy of colonialism: The dish is believed to be a descendent of paella, brought to Louisiana by its Spanish settlers.

In the petition, Zatarain’s explained those regional differences. It cited recipes, displaying a variety of styles, used by famous New Orleans chefs. And it included a letter from Chase, the late queen of Creole cooking.

“If I were asked to describe what is most important in a jambalaya and list the ingredients, which are always included,” she wrote, “I would say that the dish must be made up of at least 50 [percent] rice. Seasonings and vegetables such as onion, celery, bell pepper, and garlic are always included in some combination.”

And when it came to meat, she was agnostic. “The Creole tradition here in New Orleans is to put sausages and shrimp together in jambalaya, but when you look at how people cook here, they are creative and use whatever they have available. Most often, that does not include any ham at all,” she wrote. “Occasionally, you may find a small amount of ham in my jambalaya—but for the last 67 years, usually my jambalaya only contains sausage.” Lately, she added, she’d even been serving a completely vegetarian version, to cater to changing tastes.

Evidently, her letter worked, along with the rest of the petition, which also includes a letter and jambalaya recipes from notable New Orleans food writer Poppy Tooker, who agreed with Chase.

“Rice is jambalaya’s defining ingredient,” she wrote. “NOT ham!”

Once it’s removed from the policy book, jambalaya will join other foods—like “dipped steaks,” “poultry roast,” and “marinated” food products, all of which were removed in 2018—that no longer have an official definition. That gives Zatarain’s greater latitude to use the term, because its products are no longer being held to an outdated government standard, says Evangelia C. Pelonis, an attorney whose firm has represented McCormick, the parent company. It is now free to market a rice dish flavored with vegetable seasoning and sausage by what’s known as its “common or usual name”—jambalaya. It doesn’t need any ham.

Whether that opens Zatarain’s up to new competition—say, someone hawking a paella under jambalaya’s good name—isn’t clear. The company didn’t offer a comment by press time.