225BatonRouge.com

Lionel Key won’t say exactly when, but sometime in the late summer or early fall, he will begin his annual harvest of sassafras leaves. He won’t say where either, except that the secret spot is reachable by truck from his home in Mid-City Baton Rouge. He visits it three or four times over the course of a month, returning with a pick-up bed stacked with neat piles of leaf-heavy branches. The raw material will produce what many regard as the finest filé anywhere.

Filé, used for thickening and enhancing the flavor of gumbo, is believed to have first been produced by the Choctaw Indians who lived along Louisiana’s bayous and sold it in the French Market in New Orleans.

Key, 58, first learned his craft in 1982, but the tradition has been in his family since 1904. That was the year his blind great uncle, Joseph Willie Ricard, then only 9 years old, was given a large, hand-carved mortar and pestle by his uncle Gerard. Making filé would become the young man’s trade. Combined with homemade mops and brooms, it was how he later supported a wife and four children at home in Rougon.

Growing up, Key watched “Uncle Bill” perched behind his 120-pound, 3-foot high cypress base. Ricard used both ends of the long pecan pestle to transform crispy sassafras leaves first into papery flakes then into fine powder. He might have been completely blind, but a keen ear and years of rhythmic movements gave Uncle Bill uncanny accuracy. At 32, Key finally asked his great uncle for instruction, and Ricard invited him to take a seat.

“It made a different sound when I did it,” Key says. “It wasn’t that perfect thump. He said, ‘My Boo, you not hittin’ it in the middle.’”

So he tried again, and eventually, mallet and cradle met perfectly.

Uncle Bill lived through two more harvests and died in 1985. Key had been working as a UPS driver, but back problems inspired a career change. With his uncle’s legacy behind him, Key took up making filé.

Today, he pounds and grinds at the Red Stick Farmers Market in Baton Rouge, the Crescent City Farmers Market in New Orleans and at festivals around the state. He’s been featured in Cooking Light and Saveur and on Emeril Live, and his filé has been on the menus of New Orleans restaurants like Commander’s Palace and Dookie Chase. He’s caught the attention of groups like Slow Foods USA and the Oxford, Miss.-based Southern Foodways Alliance, which promote the preservation of indigenous foods and preparation methods.

Renowned food writer and Southern Foodways director John T. Edge has written about Key in his latest book, Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South. Edge recruited Key to help him promote Louisiana culture after Hurricane Katrina. Sitting behind his century-old equipment, Key introduced audiences in New York and San Francisco to filé, many for the first time.

“His story is really compelling,” said Edge, who believes Key’s product should be valued and celebrated.

“There are virtuous reasons to support it, like reducing your carbon footprint, but just as important is supporting a family tradition and a cultural tradition that matters deeply. Lionel is a living, breathing tether to the past.”

Then there’s taste.

Key’s filé carries citrus aromas and is made to order throughout the fall. “Those other ones,” Edge says, “taste like sawdust with a little green food coloring. Lionel’s is the only one in my cabinet.”

Lionel Key sells filé every other Saturday at the Red Stick Farmers Market beginning this month. unclebillspices.com