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Brunswick
STEW 2 FAT CHICKENS, JOINTED OR 4 FAT SQUIRRELS I POUND FAT BACON, CHOPPED 3 GALLONS BOILING WATER 2 CUPS GREEN LIMA BEANS 4 CUPS CUT-UP TOMATOES 2 QUARTS DICED POTATOES SALT AND PEPPER CAYENNE 3 CUPS GREEN CORN I LARGE LOAF WHITE BREAD BUTTER TO TASTE Cook chicken and bacon in boiling water until meat is ready to fall from bones. Take out chicken, remove bones and return meat to kettle. Add lima beans, potatoes, and tomatoes. Season. When beans are nearly done, cut corn from cobs, scrape out milk, and add. Add butter, the quantity depending on how fat the chickens or squirrels. Then add sliced bread, and stir until ingredients can scarcely be distinguished, adding a little water if too thick to stir. Eat out of cups or bowls, very hot. (Canned tomatoes and corn will serve, and the quantities of everything may be reduced by half, if necessary, though the bigger the stew, the better, and you can eat on this for 2 or 3 days).
This old-time recipe from Farmville, Virginia, explains that squirrels may be substituted "if chickens are scarce," although nowadays it's squirrels that are scarcer than hens' teeth.
A picnic and barbecue party dish all through the South, with recipes varying in different localities, Brunswick Stew is related to Kentucky Burgoo. The bread ingredient is peculiar to this recipe, being put in for additional thickening; for usually the potatoes are considered enough. Celery, carrots, and cabbage are often included too. The dish originated outdoors, in a Brunswick County kettle, and Brunswick is the Virginia county that was christened for one of the early Georges of England and his House of Hanover also known as the House of Brunswick.
This is a kettle recipe scaled for a crowd — three gallons of water and two whole chickens will fill a 16-quart pot to the shoulder. Read the parenthetical note first and decide whether you want the full batch or the half.
- Scale and yieldAs written this makes roughly 20-25 generous bowls. Halved, it still needs an 8-quart pot at minimum, and it will fill a 6-quart Dutch oven uncomfortably close to the rim.
- The hinge: reduction, not additionThe recipe gives no instruction to reduce, but three gallons of water against these quantities implies the pot is expected to cook down while the chicken simmers. Keep it at a good simmer rather than a bare one, or you may end up with soup that the bread cannot thicken.
- Bread as thickenerUse a plain white sandwich loaf, torn or sliced, crusts included. Add it a few slices at a time off a hard boil and stir until it disappears; dumped in all at once it forms pasty lumps that never break down. Stale bread works better than fresh.
- Green corn and its milk"Green corn" is fresh sweet corn at the milk stage. After cutting the kernels, scrape the cob back with the blunt edge of the knife to release the starchy liquid — that is a real part of the body of the stew. Canned corn gives none of it; add it in the last five minutes so it does not turn to mush.
- Lima beansFresh green limas take 25-40 minutes. Frozen baby limas take about 15 and can go in with the potatoes; dried limas need soaking and a good hour, and should go in with the chicken.
- Salt orderA pound of fat bacon carries a great deal of salt into a pot that may cook down considerably. Season only at the end, after the bread has gone in, and taste first.
- SquirrelSquirrel is still legal game in much of the United States in season but is not generally sold at retail; a 4-5 lb stewing hen or two 3 lb chickens will stand in. Older birds suit this better than young fryers — the connective tissue is what gives the broth its body.
- Eating on it for three daysA pot this size cools slowly, which is exactly the condition in which stews sour. Divide it into shallow containers and refrigerate within two hours, then reheat portions to a full simmer. It thickens overnight and will need a splash of water.
- FatThe butter is judgment, not measurement. Skim the rendered bacon and chicken fat first, taste, and add butter only if the stew seems lean — a tablespoon or two per gallon is plenty when the bacon has done its work.
Brunswick stew is claimed by both Brunswick County, Virginia, and Brunswick, Georgia, and the argument has never been settled; this recipe follows the Virginia claim. What is not in dispute is the form: a long-cooked kettle stew of small game or fowl with corn, beans and tomatoes, cooked outdoors over a fire for a crowd, and stirred until nothing in it is identifiable. That places it beside Kentucky burgoo and the older colonial and Native American practice of long-simmered corn-and-bean pottages, which is where the corn and limas are usually said to come from. Squirrel is traditionally described as the original meat and chicken the later substitute, an order this book's recipe reverses. The bread, as the recipe says, is peculiar to this version — the recipe itself notes that potatoes are usually considered thickening enough — and it is a reminder that these stews were thickened with whatever starch the household had rather than by any fixed rule.