Henderson Brunswick Stew
HISTORY
Internet Law proclaims that all recipes must have a history. It’s a requirement. So strap in.
When I was growing up, every time there was a family gathering of my father’s family, my grandfather (PawPaw or Papa Charlie) made Brunswick Stew. Brunswick Stew is a hunter’s stew. Which means that you basically put whatever game meat you have into a pot with tomatoes and vegetables and cook it until it’s thick and hearty.
My father’s family is large. He had seven siblings, six of whom had at least two children. Each of his parents had many siblings, all of whom had many children, who also had multiple children. I am the single only child in several generations of the extended Henderson/Drummond family. So when I say “family gathering,” a small one would be around 50 people. Large ones could be almost unreasonably, stupidly chaotic. PawPaw had a camp house on several acres of land that he used for these gatherings because no one had to have room in their house for all those people or single-handedly clean up after them. Generations of women would cook all the sides. Card tables and picnic tables and basically every flat surface would have main dishes and sides and desserts on them, some brought from home, others prepared on site.
The night before one of these gatherings, PawPaw and his older sons would drag a literal, honest-to-goodness cast-iron cauldron out of storage, clean it, season it, and get water boiling in it. They’d bury the bottom third(?) of the cauldron in the ground and build the fire up around it. I never witnessed this ritual because I was too young, but my father told me about it.
To the pot, they’d add whatever meat they had. This was rural, central Alabama, so hunting seasons were a Big Deal. Depending on the time of year, it might have rabbit, squirrel, turkey, quail, duck, or other small game meats (opossum, raccoon, …). It would also usually have beef and chicken (Guinea fowl) and sometimes pork and a lot of garden-fresh vegetables from the ~half-acre garden in the back yard.
They’d stir this concoction with a boat paddle all night long as various things were added, keeping the fire going, and making sure it didn’t stick and/or burn. If you’re picturing the three witches from MacBeth right now, I wouldn’t blame you.
By the time I came along, I was one of a throng of first cousins, once-removeds, twice-removeds, and who knows how many other removeds. Plus a plethora of older generations: aunts, uncles, great-aunts and -uncles, in-laws and out-laws… Even so, the gallons and gallons of stew lasted a weirdly long time.
Because PawPaw had a “secret.” As the gathering wore on, he would start to add hot sauce to the cauldron. He was proud of the fact that he “never ran out.” (Because the dregs were inedible to anyone without an asbestos tongue.)
I am jeopardizing my Henderson-family identity by admitting this in print to other people but…I hated the stew. In my defense, PawPaw died in 1971, when I was six years old, so I was still at the age where I would take one look at the thick gloopy mess with unidentifiable bits of slimy-looking stuff floating in it and turn my nose up. My parents loved it. My mother still laughs that they weren’t always…how do I put this?…they weren’t always necessarily thorough when they processed the meat. You might find little bits of chicken skin or little tufts of fur or a pin feather. Or a bone. Sometimes what looked like an okra seed was actually birdshot. But people just quietly laid those aside and continued to scarf it down.
After PawPaw died, each of his children developed their own recipes from their father’s.
My father (David) worked on his version for years. He taught me how to make it with only chicken, beef, and vegetables. And when I moved away to college and then, later, got my own job and house, I came up with a crockpot version that wasn’t half bad. I do prefer the stove-top version when there’s time. And there’s almost always time for Brunswick Stew.
What follows is my version of my father’s version of his father’s masterpiece. And for all I know, his father’s recipe. I hope it somehow does PawPaw’s justice. It did not win the family competition the year we had a Brunswick Stew-Off, but a not insignificant number of cousins told me they liked mine best. I’m sure it had nothing to do with family loyalty. At all.
Note: a lot of Brunswick Stew recipes that you’ll find out there on the Internet are sweet. I don’t like mine sweet. Mine is savory.
That being said, I present to you: Henderson Brunswick Stew (twice removed).
Oh, and…you’re gonna need a big pot, but not quite a cauldron. Or a calculator to reduce the measurements to make a saner amount.
THE MEAT
Adjust this to your own ratio. I like more beef than chicken. You can also do pork (ground or chunks) if you’d like. You can cut back on the meat and up the veg. You could use ground turkey or chicken. You could mix in ground veal. You could go with ground venison. You can do anything you want. :)
- ~1 lb ground beef
- ~1 lb boneless chicken breasts (or thighs if you prefer more flavor and some dark meat) (skinless)
- ~1 lb stew meat (beef, pork…I personally try to get bison/buffalo; you could even do venison if it’s not too gamey)
THE VEG
- 1-2 large onions, chopped
- 3-5 stalks celery, chopped to about the same size as the onions
- 4-8 cloves garlic, minced or put through a garlic press
- ~16 oz baby lima beans, fresh, frozen, or canned
- ~16 oz whole kernel corn, fresh, frozen, or canned
- ~8-12 oz cut okra, discarding stem end, fresh or frozen; canned is NASTY
- 4-5 large baking potatoes (russet works best, in my humble opinion)
- Optional: “some” mixed frozen veggies (peas, carrots, corn; limas, carrots, corn; green beans, carrots, corn). You do you. My mother gags at the idea (she’s a purist), so I leave ‘em out when I make it at her house.
- Optional: You could even add a chopped jalapeno (minus the seeds) if you like. I’ve never done it, but you could. :) If I did, I’d mince it and sauté it with the onions and celery. I personally prefer to add a dash of hot sauce at consumption time. :)
THE LIQUIDS
- 1-2 boxes chicken stock
- 1-2 boxes beef stock
- 3-4 large cans of stewed tomatoes, preferably with no peel
- Worcestershire sauce to taste
THE SEASONINGS
- garlic powder
- onion powder
- salt
- pepper
- cayenne / red pepper flakes (I like mine a bit spicy. Season to your own level of heat)
- oregano
- thyme
- 1-4 bay leaves
- WHATEVER YOU WANT, REALLY, all “to taste.” You know your/your family’s preferences
THE NOTES
If you get stewed tomatoes, you can process some of it into smooth sauce, some into chunky or diced…basically you can use them (or not) however you like. I like a mixture of chunks and smooth, so I use my hand to just squeeze some of the whole tomatoes through my fingers until they’re in rough chunks, and a (hand-)blender to puree some of it. Or if you don’t want to get down and dirty with tomatoes on your hands, you can just buy some diced tomatoes, some tomato sauce or puree, and whatever other consistencies you like (Paste, for instance, for an INTENSE tomato punch. If you do that, sauté it with the onions and celery to give it a deeper flavor and cook off some of that “acid” bite).
As you’re browning the meat (below), make sure the pan never goes dry and that the fond (tasty bits of browned meat and veggies that stick to the pan) doesn’t burn. Add water or stock as necessary.
Go easy on the salt toward the beginning because the stew is going to cook down, therefore intensifying the salt.
You can season as you go or add it all at once. Personally, I like to season the ground meat and onions/celery with various spices and do it that way, then add salt, pepper, and more spices to taste as it cooks.
You could, of course, just use beef stock or just chicken. I like a mix. You do you.
THE DIRECTIONS
Glug about half the stock – one box of each – into a very large stew pot. Start bringing it up to a boil. Add corn, lima beans, okra, and enough of the tomatoes to get to the level of tomato-y that you prefer. See note above. You do you. (Last time, I did two boxes of chicken stock and one of beef, three large cans of stewed tomatoes – two puréed and one squozen – and I added the liquid from the cans of corn and lima beans, and also rinsed out the tomato cans with a little water and added that in there. It was plenty of liquid, and it cooked down into a tasty, thick stew in only a few hours.
As you add more ingredients, add more stock. Make sure it’s more soupy than stew-y at the beginning. You want it to cook down.
In a large skillet, add a little oil if you got lean meat. If not, then just put the ground meat into the pan and brown it. Once it’s nicely browned use a slotted spoon to add just the meat – not the oil – to the stew pot.
In the same skillet, add the onions and celery. Sauté until tender. Add the garlic, cook for a couple more minutes, stirring to make sure the garlic doesn’t burn. Using the slotted spoon, add that to the stew pot, leaving the oil in the pan.
Roughly chop the chicken into “bite sized” pieces (like nugget size or smaller). It doesn’t have to be very small because it’s going to shred itself as the stew cooks and you stir.
In that same skillet, partially cook the chicken. You just want to get a little color (and therefore flavor) on it. Add it to the pot.
Process the stew meat so all the pieces are roughly the same size. You want these a bit smaller than the chicken – around actual bite size – because it won’t shred like the chicken will.
In the same skillet, brown the stew meat, same as the chicken. When done, you should have some tasty fond in the bottom of the pan from all that cooked meat and onions, celery, and garlic. Either add a little water or stock or scoop out some of the liquid from the stew and deglaze the pan, then add it back in, with all that tasty, tasty flavor.
This is the part where you have to use your judgment. You want it fairly watery at first so that as it cooks down, everything intensifies. So add more stock or more tomatoes PER YOUR JUDGMENT to get it to the thickness/texture/tomato-y-ness that you like.
As you cook it and taste it, seasoning lightly, you may notice a slight metallic taste from the canned veggies, but as you cook it, that goes away.
Once everything is in the pot, turn it down to a simmer and try not to let it boil too vigorously. Don’t give in to the little voice in the back of your head that tells you it would get ready faster if you only let it boil.
Brunswick Stew is not a fast food.
Cook and stir. Stirk and cook. You’ll know when it’s getting close to ready because it’ll start to get the “right texture” and the “right flavor.” The chicken will start to shred itself. The meat chunks will be very tender. The lima beans and the potatoes may start to “dissolve” into the stew.
About 20 to 30 minutes before you think it’s ready to eat, peel and roughly cube the potatoes. Add them in. This will further thicken the stew as the potatoes shed their starch, and some of the smaller pieces will dissolve entirely as you heat and reheat it.
As I’m stirring this huge pot (frequently, because tomatoes have natural sugar, and they’ll stick like glue if you don’t stir it often), if any large chunks of chicken surface, I use the back of the spoon to smoosh them against the side of the pot, further shredding them.
THE CAVEATS
I do all of this by instinct, aroma, texture, and taste, so my amounts are going to be different each time I make it. The overall contents are never exactly the same, but yet it always tastes roughly the same. :)
If you like your stew on the sweetish side (like most restaurants serve it), you can add some ketchup to taste at the end. This will sweeten it and make it bright red. I hate sweet stew and always leave that out. You do you.
THE OH MY GOD WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?
- Do not add any sort of seafood. Just trust me. That is not Brunswick stew. That is gumbo. (Tried it once. Never again.)
- Do not add rice. Again, that is gumbo or jambalaya. (Tried it once. Never again.)
- Do not add pasta. Because EW. (Tried it once. Never again.)
- Do not add cured ham. Too salty, and the entire stew tastes like cured ham.
- Do not add sausage of any kind. It takes over.
- Stay away from the cruciferous vegetables: broccoli, cauliflower, etc. And if you do want to add cabbage (see below), add it late. But it ain’t Brunswick stew if you do that. :)
- I would avoid gamey meats like the plague. Especially lamb. BUT…Brunswick stew is supposed to be a “hunters’ stew,” so again…if you like that sort of thing and want to get that ‘whatever isn’t moving or doesn’t try to eat me first goes into the pot,’ you do you. Nothing is off the table: turkey, rabbit, squirrel, venison, quail, possum, snake… :) I think this would be closer to PawPaw’s, but, as stated, I never liked PawPaw’s stew.
THE ALTERNATIVES
Included in “family gatherings” were often the parents and siblings of the in-laws. So my mother’s parents were often lovingly included in these family gatherings, so the recipe also moved laterally to my maternal grandparents. They had different tastes.
My maternal grandparents (the Branches, Nanny and Granddaddy) added cubed pork and cabbage to theirs and made it “stoup” instead of thick like stew. You could, I suppose, also add spinach, kale, escarole, or other leafy green…but to me that is not Brunswick stew. It’s good, trust me, it’s just not Brunswick stew. (See ‘cruciferous vegetable’ above.)
My mother adds a can of creamed corn to thicken the stew. She adds the potatoes first and the corn last, whereas I do it the other way around. I guess it depends on how you like your potatoes: just done or nearly crumbled away to nothing. You do you. (I like mine chunky.)
You could use Maggi or soy instead of Worcestershire. There is a little bit of a “zing” that the Worcestershire gives it that you’ll miss, but…
My housemate (who is a chef) has been known to add just a hint of vinegar to pork stews, and I like it. Like a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar for a pot of stew this big. Just for a little ‘oomph.’ It adds a little je ne sais quoi. She might also use Pomi tomato sauce and add some freshly chopped raw tomato for texture rather than going the “stewed tomatoes” route. You do you.
My father started with a huge pot and boiled an entire chicken, removed it from the pot, added raw ground beef while the chicken was cooling, used fresh veggies (from the half-acre garden he inherited from PawPaw), and when the chicken was cool, pulled it all off the bone — so you got white and dark meat — and added it in rough chunks, and did the ketchup thing at the end, mostly for color, because his was not sweet. So you could also boil skin-on, bone-in chicken pieces or a whole chicken and make your own “stock” to start with.
My mother uses a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store instead of chicken parts, and that adds a lot of that ‘roasted’ flavor. It’s good. I’ve also had it with leftover Thanksgiving or Christmas turkey in it.
Last time I made it, I didn’t have any stew meat, but I did have some leftover roast beef. So I sliced some of that, chopped it into smallish pieces, fat and all, and added it into the pot. The fat rendered and the already-cooked beef shredded and you couldn’t really tell it was in there except for that “roasted” flavor (incidentally, this is what Maggi sauce also brings to the party).
THE SIDES
I find this delicious with cornbread and/or a slab of room-temperature cheese. It’s a meal by itself, obviously.
I also like to add a few healthy dashes of hot sauce to each bowl. :)
THE STATISTICS
This is that point in recipes where people give how many it’ll serve and calories and sodium, etc. All I can say is this: It’ll serve one person for a week. Two people roughly half of that. It makes a lot of stew. It has three pounds of meat, another two and a half pounds of veggies (ish), and at least a half-gallon of stock, plus however many cans of tomatoes you decided to use. It freezes really well. It gets better with each reheating if you, like me, like to just put the whole pot into the fridge after it cools, and then take it out the next day and reheat the whole pot for the next meal. When I was living alone, I’d make this and eat it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. For days.
CROCKPOT
As I mentioned above, I also have a version of this I used to make in a crockpot, so it’d be ready for dinner when I got home from work + about two hours.
Before I left for work, I’d put a can of diced tomatoes and a selection of frozen veggies into the crockpot, add a half-pound of raw beef and a raw chicken breast and maybe just a little stock or broth (enough to make sure the bottom didn’t scorch). I’d leave it on low all day while I was at work. Then when I got home (the house smelled amazing), I’d use a big wooden spoon to stir it around to break up the ground beef and all those frozen veggies, add liquid if it needed any, and remove the chicken, shred it, and add it back. I’d then turn the crockpot to high, add the diced potatoes, and let it go for another two hours or so until the potatoes were cooked through. It’s not as good as the stove-top version, and it certainly doesn’t make as much, but it’s pretty darned good for a crockpot. :)
FINAL THOUGHTS
I hope that, if you try this, you make it your own. That’s the important part. I think PawPaw would be quite pleased at how many of his children, grandchildren, friends, in-laws, and people who never met him (such as my housemate) actually make a version of this. It would, in Alabama country vernacular, “tickle him pink.”
Oh, and as a final coda: It ain’t Brunswick Stew unless it has okra in it. For Reasons™. It just imparts a certain…something. If you don’t like okra, don’t use it. But don’t tell PawPaw.
