TIL About Perpetual Stew
TIL About Perpetual Stew
A perpetual stew, also known as forever soup, hunter's pot, or hunter's stew, is a pot into which foodstuffs are placed and cooked, continuously. The pot is never or rarely emptied all the way, and ingredients and liquid are replenished as necessary. Such foods can continue cooking for decades or longer if properly maintained. The concept is often a common element in descriptions of medieval inns.
Foods prepared in a perpetual stew have been described as being flavorful due to the manner in which the ingredients blend together. Various ingredients can be used in a perpetual stew such as root vegetables, tubers (potatoes, yams, etc.), and various meats.
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The Soup of Theseus
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Does this mean that they started the first batch thousands of years ago with Theseus in it?
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🎶 this is the soup that never ends
It just goes on and on my friends ….
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I love that lol.
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no, this is my mother's soup
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Sisyphus hoped there was one waiting down the slope
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Best way to avoid cleaning the pot!
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Made one during the pandemic lockdown. Lasted about a month before I got tired of soup.
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Was it good though?
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My husband and I had one going for a little over a week before the lockdowns as well. I just kinda lost interest in it.
Kudos to your dedication!
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One minor cultural artifact of this general idea:
Pease porridge hot, Pease porridge cold, Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old.
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Just don't scrape the pot too hard when stirring it.
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Look my iron deficiency isn't going to fix itself...
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I solve this issue by making my perpetual stew in the crater of a tiny extinct volcano.
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They usually use fire, so less a weaker flame no?, also, just scrape it everytime problem solved
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Fun fact: ever had soup at a restaurant, and then made it at home but it didn't taste quite the same or as good? There's two main reasons:
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If it's a restaurant that actually makes their own soups (versus them being shipped in in a bag to be reheated), they're very likely using leftovers to make your soup. So unless you're using the exact same ingredients as the restaurant, it's not going to taste the same.
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The bigger reason being that they likely made the soup you're eating at least the day before it's served to you. This gives the ingredients of the soup time to marry, this is that "blend together" they're talking about. This takes time, regardless of what you're cooking, but it gives the ingredients the necessary time overnight to just... Become a better soup.
The leftovers they use have likely been marrying their flavors for a day or two before they're put into the soup, so all of that blended flavor deliciousness is going to blend even more in the soup.
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Also (according to friends who've worked in restaurants), the difference is demi-glace. And butter.
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Homemade chilli is almost always better after the first day.
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Ah, but what about a perpetual 1 day blinding stew?
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I don't understand this reference.
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pretty positive it's this:
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where it was often necessary to render unruly guests blind.
(emphasis mine)
Blind?!
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Peeps really pushed the limits of unruly back in yore.
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Post links, not screenshots
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(it's an edit)
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Remember: you have to start it cooking by putting in a stone.
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Awesome.
I was leaving the library over day with my son and looked at the cart of free books. Stone Soup was on that cart and damned sure I grabbed it.
Gifted it to a friend on their child's first birthday.
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This sounds vaguely like a joke from a book I read as a child...
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At what point does a soup become a stew?
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Incidentally, would a bowl of cereal be considered soup?
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Yes, but only for the mere moments before it becomes porridge.
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Per the Cube Rule, both are considered quiche.
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And when does a stew become a pottage?
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I'd say when you would consider eating from a plate
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I would unironically love it if a restaurant had this
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Right? It sounds delicious. Not sure how that would fly with modern health and safety rules, though. The Wikipedia entry says a New York restaurant did one for ~8 months, so it must be possible somehow.
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In a comment a few minutes after yours, fellow lemmy buttPickle posted this:
45 years
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A little soup store in Illinois called journeys end did something like this. (Long gone, a Walgreens got it)
They'd have pots of soup that would kinda morph into the next one. It was pure comfort food and their sandwiches were dope. RIP.
But it was popular. I think more places should do it.
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I'm pretty sure Than Brothers (Seattle famous Thai location) did this with their stock broth.
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Only should be really careful about lentils, peas, anything that sticks to the bottom.
Cabbage is good. Beef is good. Potatoes are good. Carrots - make it go bad a bit faster when not on fire. Same with peas. And of course with onions it'll go bad very fast.
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Carrots - make it go bad a bit faster when not on fire.
Don't really know why carrots would make it go bad faster, but the point of a perpetual stew is to never stop cooking it. The fire is always on.
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It's the sugars in those vegetables. It turns the pot into a bacterial growth medium. Given enough time, something is going to survive that environment. Maybe it'll be probiotic, but most likely, it won't.
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Sugar in them, I think.
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I followed you until the end. I know near nothing about onions other than their taste and a few cooking techniques. Is there something in them that cause other items around them to go bad quickly?
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I don't know, it's just experience. Especially onions.
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Learned that this was a thing in kingdom come: deliverance :D
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I honestly went into comments for some "Henry's come to see us!" memes.
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I'm feeling quite hungry.
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So we're germs like an issue with this? Or was it okay because it was always kept heated? I mean, obviously they theu didn't know about germs in the middle ages, but they still woulda been there.
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The constant heat and the constant turnover of food/water keep it food-safe
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As long as it is always kept hot then it shouldn't be any problem at all. It can never be allowed to cool for very long though.
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I sure the occasional person was unlucky and got a bowl that wasn't cooked enough. There's also a big difference between adding more to an 80% full pot vs a 20% full one for ingredient turnover.
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We're not germs, you! ;)
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Perpetual stew of temporary blindness!
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No no, that's the perpetual mash of temporary blindness.
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My favourite soup is the garbage disposal soup. Throw all your food scraps into the freezer and at the end of the week boil it in a soup/stock.
This hunters malarkey would require you to add edible food and keep it cooking, which just sounds expensive on every level.
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garbage disposal soup
We called this "Moscow Soup" at the last couple kitchens I worked in.
Us: Uh, Chef, that's a lot of different ingredients and leftovers you're throwing in that soup pot...
Chef: I'm making Moscow Soup! You know how to make Moscow Soup? It's easy: whatever you've got on hand, goes in the pot!
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It's not something you would do at home, more of a restaurant thing.
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I do this at home to make stock. It takes me more like 2 months to save enough to make a gallon of stock, and I also save bones. It's never outstanding (typically too onion-y) but more than serviceable.
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Tried this last year for 2 months. Adding edible food was just another potato or vegetable and water/stock, and it doesn't need to be heated the whole time, it'd get fridged at night, but between lunch and dinner times I'd put it up to stew.
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A popular version of this in the Americas was sofky/sofke/sofkee/sofkey using cornmeal as a base ingredient: https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/sofkee-sofkey-sour-corn
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The perpetual blinding stew
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Seems like a way to get into a Chubbyemu video... 🤔
(Its a channel about people going to the ER because of stupid things like food poisoning, overdose on medicine, etc...)
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People have been doing this for hundreds of years without issue.
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Hundreds of years, yes. Without issue? Definitely incorrect. It is a statistical certainty that, in the entire course of history, someone somewhere has gotten sick and died from this cooking method.
Pedantry aside, it's all about who's making the stew that matters. A seasoned chef today with the sufficient knowledge of modern food safety practices can keep a stew reliably safe to eat. Some old farmer centuries ago will experience a lot more opportunities for contamination and won't notice until they get the shits.
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My dad was a cowboy and they had this cooking in little cabins on the open range.