Though she’s quite a good cook now, Bettie Champion admits that wasn’t always the case. In fact, when she and her husband returned home to Mobile from their honeymoon, she served him a frozen dinner. It tasted so bad that she vowed she would learn – and, dish by dish, she did.

“I love to cook,” she says, decades later. “I talk about cooking all the time. That’s how I show my love for folks: I feed them.”

Sitting in the spacious, neat-as-a-pin kitchen in her Victorian home in Mobile’s Old Dauphinway historic district, Bettie recently spent some time talking about how she, a one-time novice, came to be known as a local expert on gumbo-making. Through The Gumbo Academy, which she established in the commercial kitchen of the Methodist church where she was working as the part-time secretary, she taught hundreds of students the art of perfecting seafood gumbo.

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She doesn’t teach as much anymore, but she will still do a class for a small group now and then. And even though she’s not teaching, she always stocks her freezer with pints and quarts of gumbo that are available for sale ($11 and $22, respectively).

When Bettie was growing up in Mobile, her family rented the same house on Dauphin Island every summer for 20 years. During that family vacation the first week of August, her mother always made gumbo, incorporating the abundance of fresh crabs her uncle caught. At that time, for her, gumbo was strictly a summertime thing. “My mother never made it at home in Mobile,” she recalls.

After she and her husband married, they rented a house on the island (eventually, they bought a vacation home there). One time, her sister visited and said, “Let’s make some gumbo.” Bettie had to confess that she didn’t know how to make it. Her sister reminded her, “Mama won’t always be here,” so Bettie scribbled down the ingredients her mother used and made her first batch. If there’s a secret ingredient she inherited from her mother’s recipe, it’s a half-teaspoon of turmeric.

READ MORE: Mobile’s best gumbo, our top 5

The Gumbo Academy began after Bettie and some other women at the church where she worked revived a tradition of making and selling gumbo as a fundraiser. “We made a lot of gumbo and started selling it,” she says. “People would call the church and buy it.” She was able to develop her class with a grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

At one point, David Holloway, the Press-Register’s food editor, interviewed her. She was stunned when she picked up the newspaper that day in 2011 and found herself on the front page. “The neighbors could hear me scream, I was so excited,” she says. “That’s my claim to fame.”

November and December are Bettie’s busiest time in the kitchen. She typically makes a few dozen gallons during the holidays, mostly for friends and family as well as tourists visiting Dauphin Island. “I was floored when I started teaching and found out everybody had it at Christmastime,” she says. On the Alabama Gulf Coast, gumbo is traditionally served on Christmas Eve – but thanks to the availability of fresh seafood, it’s popular year-round.

On the days when she makes gumbo, Bettie starts around 6 a.m. and finishes a three-gallon batch in time to have a bowl for lunch. “I taste-test every batch,” she says. (Ironically, her husband Gil doesn’t like it.) She makes it in her “trusty pressure-cooker pot,” the same one she uses to can tomatoes every summer.

Gumbo is “such an individual thing,” she says. “It’s what you grew up with it.” In her classes, she has even helped people make it gluten-free, salt-free and okra-free.

Still, she believes gumbo must have fresh seafood, okra and tomatoes, and it should be served atop a bed of rice. She likes to make her own shrimp stock for a richer flavor, though sometimes she’ll mix that with chicken broth, and she uses her own canned tomatoes. And she doesn’t like it spicy. “You can add all the hot sauce you want to your gumbo,” she says.

She would never try it with a scoop of potato salad in it, as they do in Louisiana, and she rarely orders gumbo in a restaurant because she hasn’t found any that compares to her own.

Keeping the gumbo-making tradition alive is important to her. “I had so many people come to take the class who were just like me – they always depended on their mother or grandmother to make it, and they were both dead.”

You don’t have to take a class to receive her recipe, which can be found below. “I give it to everybody,” she says. “Gumbo is a very subjective thing. Nobody does it alike.” When she’s teaching, she expects everyone to do it her way. “But after that,” she says, “you’re on your own.”

If she shows love through making gumbo, she receives it as well. “My gratification is people telling me they love my gumbo,” she says.

For more information or to contact Bettie, visit The Gumbo Academy’s Facebook page.

Bettie Champion’s gumbo recipe:

Ingredients

Have all measured and prepared before you begin any cooking.

1 cup Crisco

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup chopped onion

1 cup chopped celery

1 cup chopped bell pepper

1 16-oz. package frozen okra or a generous 2 cups of cut-up fresh

2 15-oz. cans diced tomatoes or 1 quart of home-canned tomatoes

4 cups water, chicken broth or seafood stock (recipes below)

4 chicken bouillon cubes

1 ½ tsp. salt (can be reduced to 1 tsp. if you prefer)

1 tsp. pepper

½ tsp. oregano

½ tsp. thyme

1 tsp. parsley

½ tsp. turmeric

2 to 4 bay leaves

Dash of Worcestershire sauce

6 to 12 cleaned crab bodies and/or one pint of crabmeat, preferably claw meat

2 to 4 cups peeled shrimp (I prefer small 70- to 90-count.) This would be about 2 pounds of shrimp.

Method

Into a large stock pot, place the following ingredients and have on low heat while making your roux:

Okra and tomatoes

3 cups water, chicken broth or seafood stock (Reserve one cup for later use.)

Chicken bouillon cubes

Salt, pepper, oregano, thyme, parsley, turmeric and bay leaves

Dash of Worcestershire sauce

Crab bodies, if you have them. Do not put crab meat in at this time!

In a cast iron skillet, heat Crisco to just melted, then add flour. Stir constantly to prepare a roux to a ruch brown color over low heat, approximately 25 to 45 minutes.

Add the onion, celery and bell pepper and saute several minutes until onion is transparent.

Transfer mixture to the large stock pot.

Rinse cast-iron skillet with remaining one cup of stock and transfer to stock pot.

Cook the above mixture for approximately one hour, longer if you wish, over low heat.

After at least one hour of cooking, add peeled shrimp. Allow gumbo to return to temperature and cook for 10 or so minutes. Add crabmeat and allow gumbo to heat up again. Crabmeat does not really need to “cook.” Picked crabmeat and shrimp should not be overcooked. If you cook longer, the shrimp will be tough and the crabmeat will eventually disappear.

This recipe makes about a gallon of gumbo.

Stock preparation

Chicken stock:

Cook one whole chicken in the crockpot for 4 to 6 hours. Remove chicken; pour drippings into a container and refrigerate to remove fat. After cooling the chicken, remove meat from bones and use however you wish. All bones and skin are then boiled in a 2-quart pot, which, when combined with the de-fatted drippings, should net you enough stock for two batches of gumbo. Add approximately one teaspoon of salt, one quartered onion, a stalk of celery and one teaspoon of Mrs. Dash to season the stock. After simmering about 30 to 45 minutes, strain broth to remove all solids. Refrigerate again and remove fat.

Seafood stock:

Obtain shrimp heads (about 8 cups) from your local seafood market. They are usually free. Gently wash to remove any grit. Boil heads 30 to 45 minutes in approximately one gallon of water seasoned with one teaspoon of salt, one tablespoon of liquid crab boil or a bag of crab seasoning, one quartered onion and 2 to 4 bay leaves. This will definitely “stink” up the house, so don’t do it on a day you are planning for company. This should net you enough stock for two batches of gumbo.