Eat in

     Stew is a term so broad that it’s got one of those circular definitions: a dish that’s cooked by … stewing. So we supplement with our own definitions: savory. Hot. Good for a winter’s night—serve with a salad and crusty bread, and you’ve got a meal. Good for a gathering of friends. Makes great leftovers.

     And it’s more than thick soup. Along the soup continuum, which runs from consommé to gumbo and beyond, the balance of liquid to solid tips more toward liquid; you have to eat soup from a bowl. Stew, on the other hand, involves just enough liquid to cover the solids and could be eaten off a plate (although there’s something about cupping a bowl in your hands and inhaling—stew wants a bowl). The cooking is typically long and over relatively low heat, which helps break down the fibers in tougher cuts of meat.

     That’s good, because one quirk of stew is that it tends to be made with whatever’s on hand, which often includes those lesser cuts, coarser whole spices and vegetables, even game. For instance, Brunswick stew, said to have been created in the 1800s by a slave for his master’s hunting party in Brunswick County (Virginia, not Georgia, which has its own version), featured squirrel, rabbit, corn, onions and beans—as humorist Roy Blount Jr. famously quipped, “Brunswick stew is what happens when small mammals clutching ears of corn fall into barbecue pits.” Similarly, Mulligan stew apparently originated as a mélange of whatever hobos could contribute to the pot bubbling over a fire in the train yard. In Kentucky, it was called burgoo. In fact, because availability of ingredients so often depends on geography, many stews are named according to where they’re from and then to their central ingredient: Georgian pork stew, Provençal fish stew, Irish beef stew, Moroccan lamb stew.

     The main ingredient in all? Heat. Or is it? M.F.K. Fisher, in a 1950 essay entitled “Honest Is Good,” in Good Cooking—The Complete Cooking Companion, had another take on what makes this comfort food truly magical:

“I remember the best stew I ever ate,” she wrote. “It was not a bouillabaisse at Isnards’s in Marseille. It was made, further south on the Mediterranean at Cassis, by a very old small woman, for a great lusty batch of relatives and other people she loved. Little grand-nephews dove for equally young octopi and delicate sea eggs, and older sons sent their rowboats silently up the dark calanques for rockfish lurking among the sunken German U-boats from the First War, and grizzling cousins brought in from the deep sea a fine catch of rays and other curious scaly monsters. Little girls and their mothers and great-aunts went up into the bone-dry hills for aromatic leaves and blossoms, and on the way home picked up a few bottles of herby wine from the tiny vineyards they worked in the right seasons.