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Real Kentucky Burgoo
4 POUNDS GROUND BEEF 4 HENS OR ROOSTERS 2 GALLONS SHELLED LIMA BEANS 2 GALLONS SHELLED GREEN BEANS, OR DRIED BEANS 5 DOZEN EARS CORN, CUT FROM COB 5 DOZEN LARGE RIPE TOMATOES, DICED 2 PODS HOT PEPPER, WHOLE 1/2 GALLONS DICED ONIONS I POUND RICE I GALLON DICED POTATOES SALT TO TASTE I STICK CINNAMON JUICE OF 6 LEMONS I CUP BROWN SUGAR 5 DOZEN OKRA, DICED 1/2 POUND BUTTER MADE INTO PASTE WITH:
I CUP FLOUR Prepare all ingredients and put everything except the butter paste in large iron wash kettle hung over campfire. Cover well with boiling water. When chicken is tender remove and dice with scissors. Return to pot, cook slowly, stirring with wooden paddle from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Add butter paste about 3 P.M. After this keep only coals in fire and let simmer.
Serve in bowls, with crackers and coffee.
This is Mrs. Ross's original recipe, as used "for years in our Calhoun Methodist Church annual burgoo supper in the early Fall and they 'lick the old pot clean.' Topped off with a piece of Kentucky pie, it's a real meal. Several scout camps have used it after it won a prize in the Nashville Banner a few years ago."
I TEACUP BUTTER
This is a church-supper batch: something on the order of 20 gallons, enough for 100 to 150 servings. Scaling it down to an eighth gives a manageable stockpot version, and everything below assumes you may want to.
- Yield and vesselA "large iron wash kettle" of the sort used for outdoor cooking would typically hold something in the region of 20 to 30 gallons, though sizes varied; the recipe has it hung over the fire. In a kitchen, divide every quantity by eight and you have a heavy 12-quart stockpot's worth, roughly 15 to 18 servings.
- Hens or roostersOld-style stewing fowl, 4 to 6 lb each, tough and full of collagen and flavor. Supermarket broilers will fall apart long before 5 P.M.; look for a stewing hen at a halal or Latin market, or use bone-in thighs and legs and expect a thinner broth.
- The ambiguous onion line"1/2 GALLONS DICED ONIONS" almost certainly means 1 1/2 gallons, which is in proportion with the rest. Treat the amount as unsettled and start with the smaller quantity; onion is easy to add and impossible to take back.
- The bean quantitiesTwo gallons shelled means shelled volume, beans out of the pod, not pods in the shell. If substituting dried beans as the recipe allows, soak and part-cook them separately before they join the pot, since acid from the tomatoes and lemon slows softening and can leave them stubbornly firm.
- Rice and thickeningA pound of rice in a pot this size dissolves over seven hours and is doing structural work, not textural. The butter-and-flour paste added at 3 P.M. is a beurre manié; stir it in a spoonful at a time or it will seize into lumps that never break up.
- Scorching is the real riskNothing in this recipe matters more than continuous stirring with a long paddle, bottom included. Once starch and sugar settle on iron over live fire, a burnt note goes through the entire batch and cannot be removed.
- Timing, honestly readSeven hours is traditional and does the corn and tomatoes no favors, but a pot of this depth genuinely needs hours to come up to and hold temperature. At stockpot scale, three to four hours at a bare simmer reaches the same place; add corn and okra in the last 45 minutes.
- Cinnamon, lemon and sugarOne stick of cinnamon, six lemons' juice and a cup of brown sugar across 20 gallons is a background sweet-sour lift, not a flavor you should be able to name. Scale them down with everything else and add the lemon at the end, off the fire.
- Holding and coolingBurgoo is better the next day, but a full kettle cools far too slowly to hold overnight safely. Ladle leftovers into shallow pans to get them under 40F quickly, then reheat to a full boil.
Burgoo is Kentucky's civic stew: cooked outdoors in iron kettles for church suppers, political rallies, tobacco sales and Derby week, historically from whatever meat the county had, which meant mutton, squirrel or venison as often as beef and hen. The name's origin is genuinely unsettled, usually traced either to burgout, a sailors' oatmeal porridge, or to a mangling of "barbecue" or "ragout"; none of the explanations is documented. What is consistent across a century of Kentucky recipes is the method rather than the ingredient list: a very large kettle, a long fire cooked down to coals, a wooden paddle, and a cook who does not leave. This version's provenance is typical of the genre, attributed to a named woman, tested annually by a congregation, and carried outward through Scout camps and a newspaper prize.