Alabama NewsCenter: Meet Bettie Champion — Mobile, Alabama’s gumbo authority

By: Michelle Matthews

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 Dauphin Way Historic District, Champion spends 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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