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Brunswick Stew
When I moved back to North
Carolina a few years back after more than a decade in Southern
California, I tended to focus on the changes that had taken place
in my absence. Though I had often come back to visit family, I had
never stayed long enough to focus on the growth and transformation
taking place. But once we settled in and began putting down roots,
numerous changes stood out.
Roads had swollen and
multiplied and new buildings abounded. Sub shops and Chinese
buffets had sprouted, and grocery stores now carried kalamata
olives and Gorgonzola cheese. Bread, coffee and moon pies came in
flavors now, and fans of intercollegiate athletics showed their
love not just with tee-shirts, but with banners, face paint,
license plates and flags. Tea was still sweet, though you often
had to specify, and the K&W Cafeteria now provided balsamic and
white wine vinegars for those who wanted a little chic zing with
their greens.
Zooming along I-40, I often
needed the signs to tell me where I was, but a turn off onto roads
that had been there long enough to have only two lanes with hills
and curves soon restored my sense of place.
Produce stands still carried
silver queen, cukes, 'maters and 'lopes, and a barbecue place
promised both sliced and chopped, but no salmon, Caesar salad nor
anything grilled.
Come fall, other than the
glory of autumn colors on all those leaves on all those trees, the
sweetest sight of all was the appearance along those roadways of
signs heralding the opening of the Brunswick stew season. Starting
in September and simmering on until early November, stew season
satisfied me greatly, stirring up memories and providing the
family with many a delicious supper all the way through spring.
Brunswick stew cooks long
and slow out of doors, in big heavy pots, stirred with great
wooden paddles and tended by experts and their apprentices with
patience, energy and love. Stew takes lots of hands and lots of
hours to bring its elements together into hearty, comfort-food
harmony. This is why people have been gathering to cook it and
share it for as long as anybody can remember.
The ingredients are simple
and the techniques straightforward enough. Various meats are
simmered until tender, cooled and then boned, chopped and pulled
to pieces. Into the meat stock go prodigious amounts of tomatoes
that provide Brunswick stew with its autumnal red-orange hue. Back
in go the meats, along with diced potatoes, onions, fresh and
dried lima beans, and white corn. Seasonings include butter,
sugar, salt, black pepper and red pepper.
Many people would agree with
the process to this point, and the fact that stew cooks a long
time and needs a lot of stirring. But here is where the consensus
ends. The order of adding things to the pot, the amounts,
additions and variations on this theme are as numerous as the
leaves on the autumn trees.
Opinions are strong and
deeply felt, but not as intensely around here as those on barbecue
and slaw.
Happily, stew is low-key and
pleasing, an invitation to gather, lend a hand, and be fed in good
company.
Meats anchor a traditional
Brunswick stew, which originally featured wild game, with squirrel
and rabbit the essential elements of the classic stews throughout
the south. In recent generations, chicken has replaced the wild
game in most versions, with beef and or pork roasts also going
into the pot. Sometimes stew chefs start by cooking the raw meats
in water, but they are often cooked and chopped separately in
advance, reserving the stock for the stewpot.
The scale of a traditional
community stew recipe reminds me of recipes used on battleships
and in army field kitchens: 20 pounds of stew beef, hens by the
dozen, tomatoes by the gallon and salt by the handful.
Cooking times in such
recipes are approximate, and vary with the amount of stew, but one
thing is
certain: Somebody will be up
at 3 or 4 a.m., or at least before you and me, getting the fire
going, the pot boiling, and the paddle stirring.
The sign may say "Brunswick
Stew Saturday: 4 - 7 p.m.", but this is the invitation to the
grand finale.
The planning begins months
in advance, with the week leading up to stew day a blur of
procuring groceries, getting firewood or gas ready to keep the
pots bubbling, setting up tables and chairs for the eat-in crowd
and quart containers for the take-away line, food prep, arranging
for trash and parking--I've forgotten something, but they haven't.
The stew folks will be ready when they said they would be and the
stew will be wonderful.
The dedicated crowd needed
to produce a stew and the delicious and satisfying nature of the
finished product ensure that many a community organization makes
Brunswick stew an annual fund-raising event.
Last year my purchase of
stew at a Durham, NC, child-care center helped send their
staff-members to a conference in Atlanta. The stew I bought in
Hillsborough, NC, helped a local civic club with their service
projects. The stew I bought out in Chatham County, NC, helped pay
for a new engine for the volunteer fire fighters.
Seems to me that this
Brunswick stew is a very good deal. How grand to be able to do a
good deed with such little effort on my part and such great reward
for all! This reward can be savored now, at a long table in the
grange hall with tea and pie and friendly folks, and then again,
during, say, a big snowstorm in February, or on any
too-busy-to-cook night.
I'm always pumped up for
stew season, with a license to chow down and a bumper sticker
which reads, "I Brake for Stew!" The flaming leaves and a little
chill in the air are calling me out onto the country roads.
I am hungry and ready. My
only wish is that I had more room in my freezer.
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Preserving the Seasons
Unless my grandmother was busy
cooking at the stove or table, the pantry was my favorite part of
her kitchen. It was a deep, narrow room in the corner, lined from
floor to ceiling with shelves painted the same bluish-grey as the
rest of her kitchen. The pantry door usually stayed closed, making
it a prime destination for an escape from big and little sisters,
chores, or inquiries about homework.
Built-in shelves lined its walls on
three sides, each filled with glistening rows of jars. Half-pints
were unthinkable, not enough in them to last through a meal, but
there were pints and many quarts, as well as numerous half-gallon
jars for the most prolific vegetables and fruits. The pantry was
the safe holding her farmhouse treasure, the bounty of her
summertime garden captured under glass.
Tall jars of tomatoes, corn,
butterbeans and green beans filled the lower shelves, taking up
the greatest amount of space. Of far greater interest to me were
the upper shelves lined with squat little jars of jams, jellies
and preserves. These sweet jars chimed the hours of summer's
pleasures, reminding the family throughout the winter of how
generously summertime had rewarded us for enduring and persevering
in the season's fierce damp heat.
Strawberry jam and cherry preserves
opened the season in June; blackberry jam and jelly sang out in
July; canned, pickled and jammed peaches heralded August, and in
September apple jelly and apple butter announced autumn. Grape
jelly was my favorite for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at
home, but a visit to Grandmother's meant hot biscuits with fresh
cold butter, and only the pantry's finest deserved a place on her
table.
I don't recall helping out with the
canning operations, which took over the kitchen throughout the
summer for days at a time. I do remember passing though clouds of
steam on my way out through the screen door to take care of
business. For my two sisters and numerous cousins, business meant
climbing trees, making up plays down by the creek, naming and
babying the calves, hunting for eggs in and out of the henhouse,
or clambering up into the hayloft with a book.
For my grandmother and her four
daughters, the business at hand for a summer day was a
stove practically trembling with its vats of berries and pots of
syrups and brines. A massive washbasin of boiling water held newly
filled and sealed jars, simmering away until any pesky germs gave
up the ghost and left the building. The kitchen table groaned with
great enamelware basins mounded high with the summer's harvest:
green beans, strung and snapped; voluptuous tomatoes, blanched and
peeled and bursting with juice; strawberries red as lipstick
alongside sun-colored corn and cucumbers the soothing hue of the
soft grass under a shade tree.
Fans droned in the window and tall
glasses of sweet tea and lemonade beaded up with sweat just like
the cooks. They stood some and sat some, peeled and stirred and
tested and tasted, talking and laughing a lot and sometimes just
doing the job. There was no romance about it for them, only work
to be done to keep the family fed. The garden gave more than they
could eat and the grocery store charged a hefty price for the ease
of buying things you could make or grow yourself. It was a family
business, just as the dairy out behind the house was, only on a
much smaller scale and without the hassles of retail. The
customers, Grandmother's family and friends, seemed highly pleased
with the products and kept coming back for more. With Grandmother
in charge of quality control and personnel, the business
flourished until she retired from keeping a garden, chickens,
kitchen, house and the dairy's books.
There's romance in it form me now,
perhaps because I don't have to do it., and because it connects me
to my grandmother and to all those women toiling and talking in
the service of the seasons. I can preserve things I like but don't
grow myself, as well as those I do. I can do my canning in
diminutive quantities that would have made my grandmother question
my good sense, for I don't require a pantry nor work at it for
days on end. I like it because I have young children who think
cooking with me is a treat (usually), partly because they seldom
have to do it the way my mother and her mother and her mother did.
I like it because the process is essentially simple, though it
demands effort and focus, and because the end product lasts longer
than anything else I cook. I like to make peach jam and blackberry
jam because my grandmother made them, and fig preserves,
ginger-pear chutney and hot pepper jelly, even though she didn't.
Finally, I like it because I have
air-conditioning to keep the heat of the stove and summer sun at
bay. When we moved to North Carolina a few years back, we planted
a peach tree first thing, to remind us of he one we left behind in
our Southern California back yard. That tree's peaches were the
inspiration for my first batch of jam more than 10 years ago, and
I was eager to keep the tradition going in my North Carolina
kitchen.
The little tree settled right in,
bursting forth with a flurry of blossoms the following spring that
turned into sturdy little junior peaches as summer approached.
There were about 14 of them, and they plumped up and began turning
from green to yellowish pink. Then I began to notice a mysterious
decline in their numbers over the course of a few days. No fallen
fruit lay beneath the tree, but 14 went to 10, then 7 and finally,
5.
The mystery was solved the day I
glanced out to the backyard garden to see one of the two feisty
young squirrels, residents of our massive tulip poplar, squatting
in the middle of the garden path. The rascal squatted facing the
house, with peach #4 grasped firmly in his tiny thieving hands,
nibbling away with what I could swear was a devilish grin. I
charged him like a mother tiger (once I had made it through the
back door, the screen door, across the deck and out into the
yard), but it was a hollow victory. Me with a half-chewed,
rock-hard peach, him with the knowledge that night would come and
the phone would ring, and he and his sidekick would prevail.
No jam that year, but each year is a
new page. I'll be staying close to the window come spring. I'm
willing to share, and I'm not ready to take up hunting at this
point in my life, even to test out the authentic, traditional
North Carolina version of Brunswick stew, featuring squirrel. I'm
leaving this one up to Mother Nature, because I'm going to make
jam no matter what. In the event that I have to do some
out-sourcing this year, I'll be ready. I will have the farmer's
markets and roadside stands of North Carolina to provide me with
peaches aplenty, berries by the bushel, and tomatoes galore.
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