ON THE MERITS OF STEW…

Last night I made stew, or at least something that I am calling a stew. I am never quite sure exactly what makes a stew a stew; I never seem to have actually looked at a stew recipe – or at least not that I can recall. My grandmother’s stews always had potatoes in them – and probably beef as well while we’re at it, which is problematic here since neither the wife nor I eat the meat – and in my mind these are prototypically stewish. Despite this though, I have been working under the provisional definition that a stew is anything that you allow to sit and, well… stew, for a while, that is not, in fact, a sauce. In short, a stew is anything that you cook via stewing. And this is my topic for the day.

I love stews, but more immediately I love the concept of the stew. One throws a variety of ingredients into a pot, preferably the largest pot one has available, and lets it all cook for precisely a while. What ingredients? How long is a while? These details are largely irrelevant, as long as you don’t think about them too much.

Take, for example, last night’s stew. It had no potatoes, nor any beef. It didn’t really produce its own gravy-like substance – as my grandmother’s always did. It was primarily chickpeas and peppers, along with onions, celery, and carrots – these three being quintessential stew components. Furthermore, my primary spices were cumin and coriander. It seems to me that I was getting dangerously close to a curry here, but no, damn it, this is a stew – I say "is" since I used the largest available pot, the wife and I have days of stew ahead of us.

Since we are on the topic of pots anyway, I did not actually use a pot to make this stew; I used our large wok. Can one really make a stew in a wok? It is the largest cooking vessel we have, and it seemed appropriate for cooking all the vegetables before adding the chickpeas, artichoke hearts, and diced tomatoes, and letting the it all stew with the lid on. Does stewing have something to do with cooking over low heat with the lid on? Now that I think of it more directly, I am not even sure what it means to stew – even though I believe I have been making many a stew over the past decade or so.

Oh yeah, there were artichoke hearts and tomatoes, as well as jalapenos and other hot peppers. Do these ingredients help or hinder the argument for stew status? I am not sure. I think of tomatoes as being involved in stews – just remember stewed tomatoes – but artichoke hearts? Jalapenos? What the hell was it that I made last night?

Whatever it was, it was good. And that seems to be the point of stews. I have only the vaguest of recollections of my grandmother’s stew, of what it consisted of, or even if my grandmother really made stew, but I do know – whatever it was and whoever made it – that it was good. That is what a stew is to me, something that involves chopping stuff up, chucking it all into a pot, letting it cook while ignoring it for a while, and ending up with something good. That is why I love stew, and why I will hold to the belief that last night I made a stew, regardless of any strict definitional correlation.

Stews are a good way of going about things – despite the bad rep stewing has developed as an emotional response. Find some stuff, mess with it, and through it together, sprinkle a little of this or that in liberally, then wait. Worst-case scenario, you have a mediocre stew, but how bad can a stew really get? Unless you are a complete idiot, in which case you probably oughtn’t be cooking. If the stew works out well, make a mental note, “Remember to chuck these things in a pot together again, sometime.” Get any more specific than that and you are in trouble.

I think about a lot of what I do in terms of stews – teaching, art, writing. If anything I am a little more critical of my cooking than my work – though perhaps not, I am mighty critical.