ISSUE 80, SOUTHERN STEWS, Part 4: Virginia Brunswick Stew

Brunswick Stew

Perhaps the oldest kind of stew is the hunter’s stew.  It is an improvisatory dish.  Your protein is the field dressed bird or mammal you shot, seasonal vegetables (almost invariably beans of some sort), and basic seasoning.  Because Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia all have locals named Brunswick, all lay claim to “Brunswick Stew.” Of these claims, that of Georgia is the most hilariously self-serving—its monument to the first pot of Brunswick Stew concocted displays the iron pot where it was supposedly served on July 2, 1898.  This was 27 years after it first appeared on a Georgia menu, at Med Henderson’s Restaurant in Savannah.  The menu identified the dish as “Virginia Brunswick Stew.”

            It is interesting that the stews’ first appearance in print as “Brunswick Stew” appeared in a South Carolina paper in 1845.  South Carolina is a state that does not lay claim to its origins.  The Charleston Southern Patriot of August 13, 1845 did more than mention the stew—it provided a recipe in the form of a poem:

Several things are worth noting about this recipe.  The fact that an SC newspaper is offering a recipe for the stew, suggests that it is a “known entity,” at least by reputation.  Second, that the designation of chicken as the chief protein in the stew suggests that it has already taken a step away from its origins as hunter’s stew. An 1846 Virginia description of a barbecue at Huguenot Springs reveals the wild original—“a capital squirrel stew—called by some Brunswick Stew—was the favorite of the table” [Richmond Times & Compiler June 4, 1846]. Yet in Virginia too, domestication of the stew was under way. It became a menu item at Beck's Restorative [Restaurant], according to the Richmond Daily Dispatch of October 6, 1852.

            By the early 1850s Brunswick Stew had become a dish emblematic of country sociability and good eating.  One can see a process of mystification at work in writings from 1849 to 56.  Consider this “history” of the stew published inJune 1855 in the Petersburg Intelligencer:

            “In the “merrie” and good old fashioned days, gone, alas, never to return, there     prevailed in the good old Country of Brunswick a most neighborly and social practice, which was in this wise.  In the proper season of the year, when Summer’s vegetable gifts abound, and when Summer’s heats invite to cool springs and shady bowers, it was the custom of the different neighborhoods of Brunswick to repair almost every   Saturday to some spring, to spend half the day.  For the entertainment inwardly of the company a sufficient number of squirrels were shot, and in the absence of a supply of them, chickens were to do duty and often were were used in combination.  These articles were placed in a pot with a sufficient quantity of water and set to stewing over a slow fire.  In due time were added tomatoes, corn, butter-beans, potatoes, with the requisite condiments of salt and Cayenne pepper, all of which, when properly cooked, furnished to the participators a feast which Apicius might have envied.”

All of the devices of literary romanticism are marshaled in this sketch to lend the stew a “days of yore” charm.

            Yet the dish was new.  All of the early recipes concur that tomatoes are essential component of Brunswick Stew. Yet tomatoes only become generally employed in Virginia cookery in the 1820s—a decade before the vegetable’s national popularization in 1834.   The earliest Virginia description of the dish’s components dates from September 14, 1849: “The pride a boast of the feast was a huge and ponderous iron pot, in which steamed with delightful fragrance a ‘Brunswick Stew’—a genuine South-side [South-side of the James River in Virginia] dish, composed of squirrels, chicken, a little bacon, and corn and tomatoes ad libitum.”  The event—a pit barbecue featuring two whole hogs—was cooked under the supervision of “Uncle Ben Moody,” a legendary African-American country cook.  [Alexandria Gazette.] Ben. J. Moody, born in 1797, spent the first six decades of his life as a slave in Chesterfield and Powhatan Virginia, but lived long enough to enjoy freedom.  Another African-American, Jimmy Matthews, a slave of Dr. Creed Haskins of Brunswick County was was identified as the creator of what was originally called “squirrel stew” in Brunswick County in the early 19^th century.  A 1907 letter by local historian M. E. Brodnax posited 1828 as the year when Matthews first served the dish a local Haskins-sponsored barbecues. [I. E. Spatig, Brunswick County, Virginia (Richmond: Williams Printing, 1907), 22.]  

            It should be noted that the Haskins family recipes featured onions and bacon as the ingredients with which the squirrels are stewed.  The Ben J. Moody version of the dish—which is the form that now predominates among Viriginia Brunswick Stew makers—replaces onions and bacon with what is basically 1840s VA succotash and bacon.  It is truly a syncretic dish with Native American corns and beans—European pork—tomatoes (a novelty). [I confess I prefer okra as an additional element.]