This next recipe comes from a cookbook that my grandmother gave me many years ago:
A Taste of Georgia. It's actually a very popular cookbook in (wait for this shocker....)... Georgia! It's been published for many years and gets updated every year. Given that we've made so many southern dishes over the years I thought it would be good to finally do a dish that I've wanted to try for many years now. Brunswick Stew. I always thought it was very complicated. The only thing I knew about it was that there was no ONE recipe and that it seems to vary from one southern city to another, oh and that there was lots of competition amongst southern states as to who had the ver best. In
A Taste of Georgia there were three Brunswick Stew recipes. They all called for copious amounts of meats. Also each recipe said I needed to cook (boil) the meats and then grind them. Well I didn't have a grinder so figured chopping the cooked meats up would be ok. Right, I am jumping ahead of myself a little bit. So each Brunswick recipe in this book was a bit annoying because they were all a bit vague (grrr... hate that). But the recipe I chose seemed the easiest. Here it is:
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| Too many vague instructions! |
I knew from the start I would be having to change the recipe. For one we didn't need to feed an army of people. The next is that I didn't have a grinder. So here is the meat we bought instead of what they suggested...
First annoying vague instruction: boil meat until tender. Hmmm. Well all the various meats cook at different times to achieve "tender" right? I think we based it all around the chicken being cooked (about an hour if I recall). Here is a lovely picture of all the meat after boiling...
As I said, I didn't have a grinder so I removed all the meat (ahem, actually Ben removed the chicken meat from the bones. He is very good at this!) and chopped it up as fine as I could.
(I must admit to feeling pretty worried at this stage. The chicken tasted overcooked and the pork and beef were definitely tough!)
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| Chopped! |
Next annoying vague instruction: put beef and pork back in broth. Oh.... well how much broth should that be really? I had to go online and look at other Brunswick Stew recipes to gage how much broth we should use. I think it was 2 quarts in the end (can't remember). And then we saved the rest to use as a stock for risotto.
Next was to add the tomatoes and raw (yes raw) onion (it was weird to add raw onion instead of sautéing them at the start). Oh and a whole stick of butter (only 1 since we were cutting the recipe in half!!)
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| Another low fat southern recipe. |
Next comes the ketchup. Again - since we were halving the recipe only 1 cup.
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| This and the worcestershire are the "secret" ingredients of the stew. |
Next annoying vague instruction was the
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| What a shocker. It actually turned out to be pretty good! |
amount of ketchup and worcestershire to use. Probably once you make this many times you get a feel for how much. I feel that 1 cup of ketchup was too much. Anyway - then you add the corn and chicken and let that heat through and Wha-LA! It actually really looked like Brunswick Stew and even more unbelievably it actually tasted like Brunswick stew. I was actually impressed. My concern about the tough pork and beef was ok in the end because 1) it cooked a lot longer with the tomatoes, onion and other ingredients and 2) because it was chopped up finely so perhaps the toughness isn't such an issue. Perhaps that is why all the meat is supposed to be ground up in the first place.
I realize that this dish is mostly served as a side to BBQ instead of a dish on its own, but too bad. We had it as a main dish with (store bought!) corn bread (that tasted like cake it had so much sugar in it). The stew was pretty cutting (with all that ketchup and worcestershire) so one plate full was plenty for me. We froze the rest, so Mama if you are reading this - get ready to have some when you come to visit in a few weeks and you can be the final judge! :-)
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| The final product! |
