Stew: Around Since 6000 BC
Stew is really just a beautiful mess of vegetables, meat or poultry, and a bunch of other ingredients, that’s cooked slowly over a gentle heat. Is anybody else’s mouth-watering? Well, the practice of simmering meat in liquids over a fire until tender and delicious dates back 7,000 to 8,000 years. And that means that stew is by far one of the world’s oldest food recipes.
Photo by Craig Lee / The New York Times
Archaeological research found that many Amazonian tribes would use the hard-exterior shells of large mollusks as a type of pot to make stew in. If you’re curious as to what an ancient Greek philosopher, Herodotus, wrote down as a stew recipe, here it is:
‘Put the flesh into an animal’s paunch, mix water with it, and boil it like that over the bone fire. The bones burn very well, and the paunch easily contains all the meat once it has been stripped off. In this way, an ox, or any other sacrificial beast, is ingeniously made to boil itself.’