You use the chicken for the gumbo. You just also make the necessary stock as well, whole chickens are cheap. And the recipe feeds 14+

“The discards of a chicken” yeah that’s why you boil the chicken remove the meat then boil the bones. You get bone broth. That’s also how I make chicken noodle soup.

It doesn’t take 48 hours to make, you just make it the day before you actually want to eat it.

Seafood gumbo isn’t the same thing, and the roux for that is much harder and infinitely more complex to get the cooking times of all the ingredients correct. otherwise it ends up with a “fishy” taste.

The base is made the day or more before cooking down seafood, and then fresh seafood is added and cooked for a very short time in the soup base.

Also seafood gumbo is almost always disgusting because most restaurants don’t bother cooking it right and the ones that do charge out the nose for it. It also makes your house reek if you cook it at home.

Seafood gumbo is a derivative of a bouillabaisse, and yeah that takes at least 2 days to be considered authentic.