Stew
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the musician see Stew (musician).
A stew is a common dish made of vegetables, meat, poultry, or seafood cooked in stock and water. The line between stew and casserole is a fine one, but generally a casseroles ingredients end up as larger pieces and retain some of their individual flavours, a stew may have thicker broth as the vegetables will have gone mushy after three hours of cooking. A stew is more likely to be eaten as a main course than with other vegetables on the side, hence the reason for fewer vegetables in a casserole. There are exceptions; for example, an oyster stew is more like a soup.
Stewing has a long tradition in cookery. Popular recipes for regional stews, such as gumbo, bouillabaise, Brunswick stew, and burgoo became common during the 19th century and have increased in popularity during the 20th century.
Written records of stews go back as far as written cookbooks. There are recipes for lamb stews & fish stews in the Roman cookery book Apicius, which probably dates from the 4th century. Taillevent (French chef, 1310-1395 whose real name was Guillaume Tirel) wrote Le Viandier, one of the oldest cookbooks in French; this also has ragouts or stews of various types in it.
To go back even further, there is ample evidence from primitive tribes who survived into the 19th and 20th centuries, that they could and did boil foods together (which is what a stew essentially is). Amazonian tribes used the shells of turtles, boiling the entrails of the turtle and various other ingredients. Other cultures used the shells of large mollusks (clams etc.) to boil foods. There is archaeological evidence of these practices going back 7,000 or 8,000 years or more.
Herodotus tells us of the Scythians (8th to 4th centuries BC), who "put the flesh into an animal's paunch, mix water with it, and boil it like that over the bone fire. The bones burn very well, and the paunch easily contains all the meat once it has been striped off. In this way an ox, or any other sacrificial beast, is ingeniously made to boil itself." (Some sources feel this was how some of the first 'boiling' was done by primitive man, perhaps as long ago as ½ to 1 million years ago!)
The development of pottery, perhaps 10,000 years ago, made cooking, and stews in particular, even easier.
Examples of stews include Hungarian Goulash, Carbonnades a la Flamande, and Boeuf Bourguignon.
Hungarian Goulash dates back to the 9th century Magyar shepherds of the area, before the existence of Hungary. Paprika was added in the 18th century.
The first written reference to 'Irish stew' is in Byron's 'Devil's Drive' (1814): "The Devil . . . dined on . . . a rebel or so in an Irish stew.”
[edit] Famous stews
- Birria, a goat stew from Mexico
- Bouillabaisse, a fish stew from Provence
- Booya, a simple meat stew
- Brunswick stew, from Virginia and the Carolinas
- Burgoo, a Kentuckian stew
- Caldeirada, a fish stew from Portugal
- Cotriade, a fish stew from Brittany
- Carne Guisada, a Tex-Mex stew
- Cassoulet, a French bean stew
- Cawl, a Welsh stew
- Daube. a French stew
- Fabada Asturiana, a Spanish stew
- Feijoada, Brazilian or Portuguese bean stew.
- Gaisburger Marsch, a German stew
- Ghormeh Sabzi, an Iranian stew
- Goulash, a Hungarian stew
- Hasenpfeffer, a German stew
- Haleem, a Pakistani lentil/beef stew.
- Irish stew
- Lancashire Hotpot, an English stew
- Locro, a South American stew (mainly in the Andes region)
- Mega, Carl, Matt, Scott, Scott
- Perpetual stew
- Peperonata, an Italian stew
- Pörkölt, a Hungarian stew
- Puchero, a Mexican stew
- Ragout, a highly seasoned stew
- Ratatouille, a French vegetable stew
- Red cooking, a Chinese stewing technique.
- Sancocho, a stew from the Caribbean
- Waterzooi, a Belgian stew
- Curry, Indian and Southeast Asian curries are essentially stews[citation needed]
