A perpetual stew, also known as forever soup, hunter’s pot, or hunter’s stew, is a pot into which foodstuffs are placed and cooked, continuously. The pot is never or rarely emptied all the way, and ingredients and liquid are replenished as necessary. Such foods can continue cooking for decades or longer if properly maintained. The concept is often a common element in descriptions of medieval inns.
Foods prepared in a perpetual stew have been described as being flavorful due to the manner in which the ingredients blend together. Various ingredients can be used in a perpetual stew such as root vegetables, tubers (potatoes, yams, etc.), and various meats.
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Ah, but what about a perpetual 1 day blinding stew?
Only should be really careful about lentils, peas, anything that sticks to the bottom.
Cabbage is good. Beef is good. Potatoes are good. Carrots - make it go bad a bit faster when not on fire. Same with peas. And of course with onions it’ll go bad very fast.
Carrots - make it go bad a bit faster when not on fire.
Don’t really know why carrots would make it go bad faster, but the point of a perpetual stew is to never stop cooking it. The fire is always on.
Sugar in them, I think.
I followed you until the end. I know near nothing about onions other than their taste and a few cooking techniques. Is there something in them that cause other items around them to go bad quickly?
I don’t know, it’s just experience. Especially onions.
At what point does a soup become a stew?
And when does a stew become a pottage?
I’d say you can drink a soup but you can’t easily drink a stew.
To be more specific: you can drink the liquid part of the soup. You get soup with big chunks of meat and veg in it which doesn’t make it a stew even though you wouldn’t be able to drink it.
I think the pedantry was unnecessary. Nobody thinks you’re drinking a chunk of potato or carrot.
If it’s chunky as hella, you got stew there fella.
The Soup of Theseus
no, this is my mother’s soup
Sisyphus hoped there was one waiting down the slope
🎶 this is the soup that never ends
It just goes on and on my friends ….
Does this mean that they started the first batch thousands of years ago with Theseus in it?
If they boiled a human alive 2000 years ago and then kept dumping out half and filling it back up with broth, veggies and beef every day, would you eat it today?
There’s barely any person left in it these days
There’s a bit of an aftertaste of tar from his ship tho
Them’s good eatin’. Add some broth, a potato… baby, you got a stew going.
Potatoe and baby soup, not just filling, but nutritious!
I love that lol.
this comment goes hard, mind if i screenshot
Don’t do it, that would get you banned from the internet!
you can neither stop me nor even tell if i’ve done it 😼
What’s doing on here? I came because I sensed a disturbance in the Web
puts hands over suspiciously screenshot shaped tummy
…nothing 👀
Why would someone downvote this person? I guess there’s people who are mean for no good reason everywhere…
yep i made the mistake of conversing with the wrong person in a politics thread and now i’m watching them go through my profile and systematically downvote everything latest to earliest 😅 you would think we are all grown adults on here but many such cases
How much recently did this happened? I feel like I’ve already seen you before saying this…
Well, I guess that now you got a follower!
about an hour ago 😂 it’s certainly not the first, probably not the last time
Best way to avoid cleaning the pot!
Remember: you have to start it cooking by putting in a stone.
Awesome.
I was leaving the library over day with my son and looked at the cart of free books. Stone Soup was on that cart and damned sure I grabbed it.
Gifted it to a friend on their child’s first birthday.
This sounds vaguely like a joke from a book I read as a child…
Just don’t scrape the pot too hard when stirring it.
Look my iron deficiency isn’t going to fix itself…
They usually use fire, so less a weaker flame no?, also, just scrape it everytime problem solved
I solve this issue by making my perpetual stew in the crater of a tiny extinct volcano.
One minor cultural artifact of this general idea:
Pease porridge hot, Pease porridge cold, Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old.
Some like it hot, some like it cold, some like it in the pot, nine days old!
Made one during the pandemic lockdown. Lasted about a month before I got tired of soup.
Was it good though?
My husband and I had one going for a little over a week before the lockdowns as well. I just kinda lost interest in it.
Kudos to your dedication!
The perpetual blinding stew
My favourite soup is the garbage disposal soup. Throw all your food scraps into the freezer and at the end of the week boil it in a soup/stock.
This hunters malarkey would require you to add edible food and keep it cooking, which just sounds expensive on every level.
Tried this last year for 2 months. Adding edible food was just another potato or vegetable and water/stock, and it doesn’t need to be heated the whole time, it’d get fridged at night, but between lunch and dinner times I’d put it up to stew.
It’s not something you would do at home, more of a restaurant thing.
I do this at home to make stock. It takes me more like 2 months to save enough to make a gallon of stock, and I also save bones. It’s never outstanding (typically too onion-y) but more than serviceable.
Perpetual stew of temporary blindness!
No no, that’s the perpetual mash of temporary blindness.
I would unironically love it if a restaurant had this
Right? It sounds delicious. Not sure how that would fly with modern health and safety rules, though. The Wikipedia entry says a New York restaurant did one for ~8 months, so it must be possible somehow.
Needs to be kept above 70degC so heating could be costly. Other than that it’s safer than refridgeration as that only slows growth whereas keeping it hot prevents any growth at all.
Better: Above 60°C pasteurizes the contents so killing all bacteria.
Technically pasteurization is met by holding the food over a specific temperature for a specific time, so over 63-65°C for 30 minutes, or 100°C for 12 seconds.
Normal pasteurization is very similar to cooking in times and temperature, and so pasteurization cooks both the food, altering texture, appearance and taste, and the bacteria.
UHT means ultra high temperature pasteurisation, which heats, eg, milk well over 100°C for only a couple of seconds and immediately cools it, minimizing the alteration of the milk.
So, by keeping the stew over 70°C, the stew is completely food safe.
In a comment a few minutes after yours, fellow lemmy buttPickle posted this:
45 years
I saw that, and I also vaguely remember reading that in the past. So I guess it was less TIL and more “today I remembered” lol.
A little soup store in Illinois called journeys end did something like this. (Long gone, a Walgreens got it)
They’d have pots of soup that would kinda morph into the next one. It was pure comfort food and their sandwiches were dope. RIP.
But it was popular. I think more places should do it.
I’m pretty sure Than Brothers (Seattle famous Thai location) did this with their stock broth.
So we’re germs like an issue with this? Or was it okay because it was always kept heated? I mean, obviously they theu didn’t know about germs in the middle ages, but they still woulda been there.
We’re not germs, you! ;)
As long as it is always kept hot then it shouldn’t be any problem at all. It can never be allowed to cool for very long though.
So also keep it on while sleeping? Sounds a bit scary. I guess back in the days someone was chosen to keep the fire running anyways but nowadays? Also turnover wouldn’t happen for a few hours.
Back then the fire in the stove was also what heated your home.
And lighting fire was very difficult, so you kept it burning.
Completely unrelated but I didn’t know underscores could also denote italics
The constant heat and the constant turnover of food/water keep it food-safe
I sure the occasional person was unlucky and got a bowl that wasn’t cooked enough. There’s also a big difference between adding more to an 80% full pot vs a 20% full one for ingredient turnover.
Learned that this was a thing in kingdom come: deliverance :D
I honestly went into comments for some “Henry’s come to see us!” memes.
I’m feeling quite hungry.
