Brunswick Stew Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What was original Brunswick stew made of? ›

Virginia's Early Record of Brunswick Stew

In 1849, the Alexandria Gazette described Brunswick stew as "a genuine South-side dish, composed of squirrels, chicken, a little bacon, and corn and tomatoes."

For most types of stew, it takes time to develop great flavor. Stew uses collagen-rich, tough cuts of meat, which need at least two hours to break down. If you try to rush it and boil the stew, the muscle fibers will shrink and become tough. So give yourself a few hours to let it do its thing.

Mix in potatoes.

Potato starch naturally thickens soups and stews and can be a gluten-free option if you're looking to make a gluten-free stew. Add cubed potatoes to the stew to absorb excess liquid, or add potato flakes, mashed potatoes, or a potato purée to thicken your stew.

Georgians find Virginia's stew mushy and thick; theirs is more liquid, with identifiable chunks of vegetables and meat. In Georgia, Brunswick stew almost always contains peas; in Virginia, almost never.

The difference between Brunswick stew and beef stew is very simple. Beef stew consists of beef, vegetables, tomato sauce, and some seasoning, while Brunswick stew has a very spicy flavour that comes from a combination of BBQ sauce and ketchup, and is made with beef, pork, and chicken.

It's preferable to use fresh corn and butter beans when they are in season. The stew can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 5 days or frozen for up to 4 months.

For safety reasons, the general guideline is that perishable foods, including cooked beef, should not be left out at room temperature for more than 2 hours. If the room temperature is above 90°F (32°C), this time is reduced to just 1 hour to prevent bacterial growth.

Store any extra Brunswick stew in an airtight container in the refrigerator. It will keep for up to 3 or 4 days. Reheat before serving. Brunswick stew also freezes well.

But the liquid itself should not be thick in the same way that gravy is thick. So skip the roux, and don't bother dusting the meat with flour or cornstarch before browning, either, as some recipes will suggest. That will just interfere with getting a good sear on the meat, and gum up the stew with unneeded starch.

Why put vinegar in stews? ›

Vinegar can add depth of flavour to soups, sauces, and stews. Especially great for tomato-based recipes, you can add a couple of tablespoons of vinegar towards the end of the cooking process to amplify the flavours of your other ingredients.

If you think about it, vinegar is really a flavor-enhancer (umami). That's why it is so often used in cooking, sauces, and salad dressings. The same is true with soups.

If your dish is a little too sweet, try rounding out the sweetness by adding flavors or ingredients that are sour, bitter, or spicy. It may be obvious not to add more sweet ingredients, but you should also stay away from salty ones since they actually bring out the sweetness in food.

Serve this Brunswick stew with pickles, coleslaw, or a salad on the side. Don't forget about the cornbread or biscuits. Get creative and serve this with fried okra, hushpuppies, or sautéed spinach.

Brunswick, Georgia, claims to be the place of origin for Brunswick stew. A twenty-five-gallon iron pot outside that coastal town bears a plaque declaring it to be the vessel in which this favorite southern food was first cooked in 1898.

A plaque on an old iron pot in Brunswick, Georgia, says the first Brunswick stew was made in it on July 2, 1898, on nearby St. Simons Island. A competing story claims a Virginia state legislator's chef invented the recipe in 1828 on a hunting expedition.

There, according to an entrenched local tradition supported by a 1988 Virginia General Assembly proclamation, Jimmy Matthews, an African American hunting-camp cook, concocted a squirrel stew for his enslaver, Creed Haskins, in 1828, the stew being named for its home county.

In Japan, the restaurant Otaf*cku in the Asakusa district of Tokyo serves a stew called oden, which has been replenished constantly since 1945.

Bumble Bee Foods acquired Castleberry/Snow Brands in December 2005, and Castleberry was shut down by the FDA in 2008. Bost Distributing Company bought the Mrs. Fearnow's Brunswick Stew brand from Bumble Bee in 2007, according to its website.