I mostly make vegetable, lamb or beef. Brothy consistency to the juice. Lots of big vegetable pieces in any. Usually tomato-y. Stew carrots (not super big ones) is my all time favorite from childhood, I don't like russets in stew, unless for thickening. So much so, I've taken ketchup to them when Mother used them. New pototoes, fresh or canned, are super. Eggplant and zucchini do not belong unless it's ratatouille. Lovve stew. 😄

Also, boeuf bourguignon, which is very good but too fiddly to make often. And my mother's arroz con pollo ditto plus plus.

Multitudes of stews made depending on available ingredients and mood. But a classic is beef with dumplings, winter root veg and pearl barley.

My eyes were opened the first time my BF made beef stew for me. It was nothing like the beef stew I had grown up with! If I make a stew, it leans towards what’s familiar to me, like my mother’s versions of beef stew, kidney stew, or mushroom stew. Now I’ll crave her mushroom stew. lol! She loads it up with hunks of beef, pork, and hot sausage, mushrooms, green bell peppers, and canned tomatoes/sauce. yum. Stews should be chunky, with less broth/gravy than you’d find in soup. :)

The only stew I make, other than chicken soup which is essentially a chicken stew, is lamb stew. Lamb chunks, usually from a leg of lamb, water, beef broth, lots of veggies, potatoes, and some Jamaican pepper sauce.

I was just thinking of stew this morning for some reason, and wondering if they still make canned Dinty Moore stew, lol. I doubt I'd find it palatable now, tho we had that once in a while when I was a kid, but usually my mom made it from scratch. She floured beef, browned in oil or Crisco, added liquid (water), onions, and bay leaves, cooked until almost tender, then added potatoes, carrots, maybe some bouillon and simmered until veggies were tender. No tomatoes, ever. If we had celery she might add that, but wouldn't buy it specifically for stew. If we had red wine opened, she might add some of that but it was rare. It was basically the same recipe she used for pot roast but with the meat cut in smaller chunks. I think she might have added a bit of a flour and water slurry to thicken the liquid a bit. It was more like gravy than broth.

Good timing, John! I just bought several pounds of chuck for beef stew. For beef I tend to go back and forth with various versions of the Silver Palate's Pot Roast (great for stew) and two from Ina Garten…Beef Bourguignon and Parker's Beef Stew. It’s rare I make beef stew without at least some red wine. Sometimes I just long for my mom's retro pot roast (kind of like stew) with the Lipton Onion Soup packet. You're so right regarding "very broad category."

DH came home yesterday with a 5-pound boneless lamb leg. Some of that will be for more Lamb and Artichoke Stew.👍🏻

IMHO, soup is thinner and needs a spoon to eat. Stew is much thicker and can be eaten with a fork or spoon.

Beef is the stew I make most, and my faves to add are sliced fennel bulb and chunks of winter squash - along with the standard onions, carrots, potatoes and bay leaf. I don't use tomato, generally, but will add celery for umami.

I also make a sort of Southwestern style chicken or turkey stew with peppers, onions, garlic, squash, tomatoes, beans and corn, using traditional seasonings: oregano, cumin and some hot pepper - usually chipotle powder.

I also use marjoram when I have it.

If I could find a 5# boneless leg of lamb around here, I would roast it with rosemary and garlic.

“If I could find a 5# boneless leg of lamb around here, I would roast it with rosemary and garlic.”

Carol, we tend to marinate and grill boneless lamb. Rosemary and garlic are definitely involved.

we have a stewing conflict, ha!, in my house.

SWMBO wants the wet stew of her childhood. Soupy, soft, floury, comfortable.

I am increasingly interested in drier stews. Sharper flavors, more texture, more tooth.

Last night I took the largest step yet in this divisive direction. I pressure cooked beef with onions, garlic, herbs, and red wine. While that was going on, diced and wok-cooked carrots, turnip, potato until browned and medium-soft. Thickened the beef-wine liquid with my pre-browned flour, butter, and a little heavy cream, sharpened and darkened it up with more wine. Combined everything and cooked another 15 min. The whole process only took about 90 min.

Reviews were mixed. People liked the flavour, were confused that the veg was not mushy, and SWMBO registered a protest at the no-soup consistency. There was also a general criticism that I didn’t make enough.

Clearly I shall have to alternate between pleasing the family and being true to my muse.

Muse-true is always satisfying, but satisfying the family, nourishing them and comforting them, is surely the top goal of cook-artistry.

Wet or dry, stews are supposed to be tender. The word "stew" implies it. There are all kinds of saucy-meaty words to use for other things. The stew carrots that delight me so are not mushy, but neither are they crunchy. They're fork tender, but have integrity. That said, I would think crunchy would be worse than slightly mushy on the is-it-stew meter. Same for the meat. It should have textural integrity, and not be cooked into tastelessness nor mushiness, but should also be tender. That's what stews are for. A way to make tough cuts of meat and old birds desirable to eat.

I forgot to mention coq au vin above. Finding a good coq isn't easy nor cheap anymore, but it's a favorite. :)

Yes, it seems there should be two cardinal. rules --- satisfy the hunger and make the meat soft. You can then argue if you have a stew, a pot roast, braise/brasato or soup.

I've been tending to making a daube with beef (some variants like the one from Avignon use lamb). There are many variants but it is a bit different than a bourguignon (a bit less fussy) and the flavor profile a bit bolder (depending on your recipe). It also can be paired with mash, gnocci or pasta pretty easily.

I made a bourride (fish/seafood stew) for a party recently -- it is finished with aioli as a final thickener.

What are some chicken "stews"? I've made a Japanese nimono. Does coq au vin count?

For lamb, I've made simpler irish variants. How about posole? Is that a pork stew?

The posole here, SoCal, is crowded soup. I can imagine a stew type variation. It would have to be a lot more meat and veg and less hominy and broth.

You'll know better than I what an authentic coq au vin is, but the way the recipe I know goes, it's a stew, and it's similar to the kind I've had in French style restaurants.

Is pot roast, as many have mentioned above, a kind of stew? I think it is, though I never thought of that before.

I make mine much like the one Olychick mentioned, with beef, onions, potatoes, carrots, broth. I sometimes add parsnips but not usually and occasionally I use venison in place of the beef. Grandma used to make it with squirrel or rabbit. No tomatoes and no wine. Cube and flour the beet and brown it on the stove top in a dutch oven, add the veggies and the broth, put the lid on it and bake it at 325F for several hours until the broth becomes a thick sauce and the meat falls apart. Serve with biscuits or dumplings, your choice.

I also make gumbo, fish chowder, cioppino, but I don't really think of any of those as stew, for some reason.

Annie

I casually opined that stew may be the oldest kind of cooking. Thinking harder, that seems wrong.

Leaving aside drying meat or fish in the sun - i.e. jerky - which is arguably not “cooking” but preserving, I now think the first cooking technique humans used must have been roasting with an open flame. Spear meat or fish on a stick, hold over fire. Put rocks by fire, place meat on rock. And so on.

At some point, humans learned to make water tight vessels, probably from animal hides or organs, or bark and pitch. Then they learned to heat rocks in fire and place the hot rocks in the vessel full of water. Or, they learned that the vessel itself could be placed by or in the fire, and the water inside would keep the vessel from burning. Maybe. It’s a little controversial. Possibly because few paleontologists learned to boil water in folded paper “pots” as taught in the Boy Scouts.

I was never a Boy Scout, but when I was little I had a copy of the “Manuel Des Castor Juniors”, who were Donald Duck’s nephews Huey, Louie, and Dewey - excuse me, Riri, Fifi, et Loulou - in the Castor Juniors, a Boy Scout-like and probably entirely fictional group for juvenile ducks in France. The book had all sorts of useful tips for children to know in the woods, like finding north from the moss on trees, weaving baskets from tallgrass and reeds, and boiling water in paper bag-pots. As a strictly urban child, all this seemed terribly exotic to me. Much later, in my backpacking years, I learned that the Castor Juniors’ tricks didn’t have much application in the rocky mountains and forests of the Sierra Nevada. But I still have my Manuel.

Anyway, humans were probably boiling and stewing as early as 200,000 years ago, well before we learned to make earthenware pots, but probably roasting still came first.

https://paleoanthro.org/media/journal/content/PA20150054.pdf

https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_des_Castors_Juniors

SWMBO informs me that “stew” is eaten with a spoon, or at least a spoon must be necessary to finish your bowl - otherwise it is not liquid-y enough to be stew, and she wants stew, not meat and veg with sauce.

So she does not consider boeuf borguignon ”stew”, nor coq au vin, nor whatever it is that I made her. She’s rather pointed about it, in fact.

“satisfying the family, nourishing them and comforting them, is surely the top goal of cook-artistry.”

plllog, you are a nicer person than I.

LOL! Maybe a gender difference?

I understand Ms. Liu's preference, but to me, who grew up eating a lot of stews, with the older women teaching the construction thereof, the division is that stews are eaten with forks from plates, and if the foodstufs aren't sufficient to mop up the juices, one can use a crust of bread. Soups are dishes of liquid with optional lumps, eaten with big spoons from bowls, or even sipped from mugs. The lumps should not require much chewing. Slurping is a possibility. Ragout, IME and not necessarily the correct definition of what you find in France or Italy, is somewhere in between. A stew, but smaller chunks, and a more unified flavor, a much thicker carrier that has a body more like a sauce than a broth, but full of the nutrients like a soup, rather than separate like a sauce, while at heart a kind of stew.

No, you’re just nicer :-)

“Is pot roast, as many have mentioned above, a kind of stew?”

To me the difference is pretty much the size of the meat and amount of liquid. Flavor can be the same. I serve pot roasts plated and use large-ish shallow bowls for stews.

ETA - Another thread made me think of this. For any horseradish fans, Fine Cooking had a really good recipe for Beef Stew With Root Vegetables and Horseradish. Don’t have the recipe at hand but easy to google.

I love lobster stew and oyster stew. Love chowders also.

We make what I think of as a lean, thin but flavorful ”Northern Italian” beef stew. Low fat. Beef but brothy, no oily gravy thick stuff. Simple flavoring and seasoning — Bit of garlic, thyme, pepper, salt, maybe bit of sage. Maybe medium chop carrots, potato and some tomato. Lean, flavorful, elegant. Not thick, not gloppy. Clean mouthfeel and taste.

Unless you are cooking a tough meat for a long time to make it tender, it is not a stew, according to your definition (not mine).

I make jambalaya, but it is a rice dish - not a stew. You could call gumbo a stew, but I never have, and I do not call lobster bisque or seafood chowders stews, since they do not require long cooking.

Gumbo takes a long time, but that is because it has a lot of steps and generally a lot of ingredients. Coq au Vin is definitely a stew, but I never make it, and I have not liked it when others made it.

I like beef stew but do not make it because my brother will not eat it. I do not make chicken stew because I do not like chicken that has been cooked too long.

When I make gumbo, I add shrimp, crab, oysters, and scallops to it, but only at the end of cooking. I also omit sausage, as it interferes with the flavors of the seafood, but I do add a Habanero chili to it. The only vegetables it has are okra, celery, and onion, and I like to use a lot of okra. I generally buy frozen okra, as fresh okra goes back quickly, and frozen okra tastes better to me.

Gumbo is not nearly as good when reheated, but I do freeze leftovers in individual serving size containers so that I will defrost only what I want to consume.

JL, I know you know this, but what we're talking about, in the case of Mrs. JL, is word usage. Both of you know what she wants her ”stew” to be. Perhaps change your word to ”melange” or ”concatenation” or ”togetherness” for those too dry for her expectations, to avoid the drama? (Or does that fall into too-nice-dom?) Technically, any dish produced by stewing, cooking in liquid for a long time over low temperature can therefore be called ”stew” even if it looks more like chunky soup to the rest of us. To me, needing a spoon (not choosing, but needing) is the thing that makes it soup rather than stew, but it's just words, not the dish itself.

Ha - you might even call it a mess, in the oldest sense of that term 😀

"ORIGIN

Middle English: from Old French mes‘portion of food’, from late Latin missum‘something put on the table’, past participle of mittere‘send,put’. The original sense was ‘a serving of (semiliquid) food’, later ‘liquid food for an animal’; this gave rise (early 19th century) to the senses ‘unappetizing concoction’ and ‘predicament’, on which sense 1 is based. In late Middle English the term also denoted any of the small groups into which the company at a banquet was divided (who were served from the same dishes); hence, ‘a group who regularly eat together’ (recorded in military use from the mid 16th century)."

And FWIW, thigh and leg meat is what use for any long-cooking dishes, as it doesn't deteriorate in texture like white meat does.

plllog, you have foretold the future.

I sought to negotiate with SWMBO on this. She is unyielding. To quote: "stew is soup!" So it has been decreed: I will have to make thick, lumpy, meat and veg soup served with bowl and spoon, when I want to make "stew".

When I make something else, I will have to pass it off as . . . can't use a name that sounds unfamiliar or iffy, as the family is suspicious of my cooking tendencies, "mess" or "melange" will invite interrogation worthy of a CBP agent faced with a French tourist carrying stinky cheese.

“Braise” could work without sounding suspicious.

Or you could try "estofado". There are enough different kinds that you could pretty much stretch it around whatever you like. The images look like stew to me. :)

OTOH, when my father said we were having "ragout" for dinner, he meant my mother was inventing some kind of delicious concatenation of leftovers in stewlike form, not the Italian ragus (I usually use the French spelling to disambiguate from the grocery store brand).

How about 'slumgullion' ?

“Braise” or ”ragout” would be familiar enough to pass. ”Slumgullion” or ”estofado” would cause a revolt. Social order is a fragile thing when dinner is threatened!

Is your bilingual, cook-daughter going to argue with you about those words?

DD does not hold that stew = soup. She is willing to countenance ”fork stew”. So I don’t have to use the disguise word with her!