Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Kind of related to this is the concept of "Brunswick Stew." Look it up if you want a more accurate description, but as I recall, the idea from Colonial times in America is that there'd be a tavern/inn with a fire, constantly running, and a big cauldron of stew always topped off and ready for weary travelers. The idea is that they never "finished" a batch. They just perpetually added leftovers and foods that were at risk of spoiling.

It's like a Soup of Theseus... it's always the same stew, but it so gradually evolves, the flavour changes, the ingredients change, but there it is.

The concept feels incredibly cozy to me, both in practical and conceptual terms.

View on HN

I haven't had it personally, but one of my SO's tried a famous "perpetual stew" when in France and we talked about it at one point. Her description kinda matched what I'd expect from braises that I've let go to long: you end up with bland mush.

I think there's a reason very few restaurants serve this style of dish, and it's not because of health codes. We live in an era of insane abundance compared to the medeivil and colonial eras. A lot of historic dishes from those times just don't stand up to the expectations of a modern pallet.

It's a romantic notion but if you simmer anything for too long it'll just be generic food water at some point

It’s just old timey MSG.

How does this make any sense? The longer you simmer something, the more concentrated the remaining material becomes.

Volatile flavor compounds boil off as well.

The flavor breaks down and so does the food.

For example: boil potatoes for too long and more water gets into it. It'll kill the flavor and texture, so that the food tastes watery and the texture becomes soup-ey and wet.

> I think there's a reason very few restaurants serve this style of dish

It is in fact quite common in some parts of China, as the OP mentions. But it's just a stock, used in other dishes, not a dish of it's own.

> more specifically in the cuisines of Canton and Fujian, where there’s a rich tradition of making lou mei, or master stock, which is used to braise and poach meats.

I had read about this before, I recall an article about maybe a US restaurant where the chef had brought the lou mei over from China, and the sous chefs who were tasked with keeping it going. I can't seem to track down the article now. But my understanding is that in fact very many restuarants in China do this, it's standard.

Not sure about China, but I’ve encountered local restaurants boasting broth that has continuously been cooked for decades in both Thailand and in Philippines.

Yep.

The thing is you don't "drink" the stock (lou mei) because it's too salty. So the solid foods are taken out without much of the liquid, and when you've served all the food in a batch, you're left with ~50% volume of the stock. It's still flavorful, arguably even more so since it absorbed the other food flavors in addition to the original spices etc. So if you're operating a restaurant, you just keep the liquid, replenish it with a bit more spices and condiments, and use it again and again...

Nice, thanks for the context!

I hadn't totally realized you're cooking food in it, removing the food, then re-using the broth! i guess you must have to strain it periodically. That is admittedly a really odd practice to me! It seems like it's origin might be at least in part just to not waste the stock? But people really believe it is important for flavor? (I am not suggesting it's not, how would I know?)

thanks for your comment,

just a small correction, it's "medieval" and "palate"

"palate" is a physiological term which describes the roof of a beings mouth.

Edit: @NovemberWhiskey I didn't know it was a dual-purpose word, thanks for the correction.

No; "palate" was correct - it's a metonym in this case.

I've always thought of it more as a way to conserve the calories that food represent, rather than a delicious dish in its own right

Agreed.

It's not some ultimate dish, nor was beer some delicious delicacy.

These were techniques by our not so distant ancestors to survive in far less connected, far less hospitable times and conditions.

It can preserve flavor, but it becomes concentrated as the water evaporates away, so i wouldn’t say you should ever grab a bowl of just that.

Master stocks are used as a base in Chinese cooking the same way a lot of recipes already start from a stock; but it is rarer and rarer for home cooks to make stock from scratch and not just use a box from the store in the US. I have a lot of friends that categorically do not cook meat with bones in it. The Chinese one is also different from hunters’ stew in that it is a specific soup used as a base for future versions of said specific soup

Aromatics also tend to escape as well, not just water. There’s some good tests out there with venting vs non-venting pressure cookers for making stock

>It's rarer and rarer for home cooks to make stock from scratch

Pity, it's really easy and super delicious.

This past weekend my family was sick so I went to the store and got one of the deli roasted chickens (was in a hurry), pulled off most of the meat, and put it in a stock pot with celery, onions, carrots and some seasonings (S&P, fines herbs, star anise, bay leaves), and filled with water. Simmer for 3 hours, strain.

Amazingly delicious, pretty easy, and the chicken and dumplings I made with it turned out fantastic.

Pretty much any time there's a bone or carcass I'll use it to make something. Had a work lunch last week and I took the ham bone to make ham and beans.

LPT: Cook with bones.

"...concentrated as the water evaporates away"

on a long running stock, you would regularly add water to keep it from drying out.

A local restaurant had a minestrone soup that had been running for 10-15 years, until the place burned down.

It was ridiculously good. I think the key aspect that made it good was that they served it with every meal so it turned over a lot.

Do you know what they did on holidays? Did they just never close for any reason whatsoever?

also known as hunters pot / stew. Essentially the same thing as thing as the broth, but in stew form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew

I've actually done this myself in a crock pot for up to a few weeks at a time. The order you add stuff makes a difference. You don't want to toss in fish or anything with real strong flavors too early in your run or it funks things up for a few days. Much as the concept is fun, soup/stew every day gets weary pretty fast. Fun for short bursts in the winter though.

Huh. I am a relatively recent (11 years) transplant to Virginia and had never heard of Brunswick Stew until I moved here, where lots of people make it (it's "traditional") but I have always found it to be thin, bland, and insipid, so I'll take the minimum amount to be polite at an event but otherwise avoid it.

But of course they're all making it fresh from a recipe. I wonder if the reason I'm finding it bland is that the true traditional version includes a range of flavours from all the previous leftovers? That seems very plausible to me.

Traditionally, the first step is making stock from a bowling-ball.

Stirring with the number 7 pin of course

My parents were too well-off for Brunswick Stew, so we had Titleist Bisque instead.

My wife hates it because growing up in North Carolina she associated it with hunters throwing in bits of meat from whatever their most recent kill was - rabbit, squirrel, maybe venison. Never know what you're eating.

It is just bland. I grew in southern Virginia and it was a fixture of wintertime and often sold by churches and fire departments. At best, it’s tomatoey and doesn’t have too many lima beans, but is always a bit gluey and the meat just sort of turns into little string of muscle fiber. Honestly it makes me a little queasy just thinking about it. Most of the time it seems to have been cooled for 2-3 days prior to sale, for what that’s worth.

Perhaps i'm geeking this out too much, but I guess it depends on ingress-vs-egress and drawdown....but...doesn't including nearly spoiling food risk the whole stew going bad in a few days? Or do the constant simmer prevent that?

I don't know. I'm not sure the historians fully know. This concept might even be apocryphal to an extent. What I have learned is that the concept evolved (like so much cooking does) from what I described into a "it's actually now a recipe that people prepare once."

Something else I learned is that back in the day, people had different expectations for food quality. We would regularly eat rancid meat (many BBQ sauces were specifically built to hide/safen up rancid meat). And maybe while the concept was "it's always going", there were practical things we like to exclude from oral/written tradition, such as "well... actually we purge it once a week otherwise it goes completely bad." Who knows!

> well... actually we purge it once a week otherwise it goes completely bad

I know that when I cook stews I often end up with a lot of food bits stuck and eventually burned at the bottom and sides of the pot. I can imagine keeping it going by pouring the stew contents to another pot so that I could clean the first pot though. Without doing that... those stuck & burned bits will certainly add "flavor" to the stew.

> ...those stuck & burned bits will certainly add "flavor" to the stew.

Cooking fuel from wood was expensive to procure, so if I were making such a stew I'd cook it low and slow to conserve precious wood, so maybe they "cooked" over coals back then.

If I were to do this today, I'd top off with lots of water before bedtime so there won't be burnt bits in the morning. Maybe try to seal the lid edge with dough that can be used as bread in the morning to sop up the stew (might need to do 2-3 batches of such bread to make the supply of it last through the day).

I'd also likely use a rocket stove, a pot heat exchanger [1], and hot water pipes on the inside and outside of the rocket stove exhaust port to extract out as much working heat as possible.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1j1RI3D7Zk

This stuff is known as "fond" and it's commonly used to make flavorful liquids (stock/broth).

Wonder if the word fondue is related to fond.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fondue

I first read about fondue in Asterix in Switzerland (IIRC). Good fon(due)!

#PunIntended

There is fond (which can also burn) and then there is charred debris. The former adds umami, the latter tastes like cigar ash.

> Without doing that... those stuck & burned bits will certainly add "flavor" to the stew.

Pretty sure you're joking, but very likely they will. A limited amount of little charred bits taste quite good, and unless there's serious issues with heating or composition, it's not like it's going to overwhelm the rest of the flavors.

> This concept might even be apocryphal to an extent.

I've been to a pub in rural Cambridgeshire that had this on the menu. I made them laugh by asking what was in it and was it vegetarian.

I don't know if they were legally allowed to have it, but they did have it.

>...We would regularly eat rancid meat (many BBQ sauces were specifically built to hide/safen up rancid meat)

I think the idea that spices were used to cover the taste of rancid meat is generally considered to be a myth.

>...One myth needs busting here. Contrary to what you may have read, sauces were not invented to cover the smell and taste of spoiled meat. Spoiled meat tends to make people sick or dead, so, although covering it with a sauce might make it more palatable, people who used this strategy probably tried it only once.

https://amazingribs.com/barbecue-history-and-culture/barbecu...

An influential source that promoted this idea was a 1939 book by J.C. Drummond. Those as this review of the book shows, Drummond provided little evidence for his assertions and made errors like misinterpreting the meaning of words like “greene”:

http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/drummond.pdf

> Spoiled meat tends to make people sick or dead

I'm not defending the sauces and spices hypothesis, but in times of scarcity (how most of our ancestors lived most of the time), starvation kills more people than spoiled food, and people ate a lot of spoiled food. Who knows how many it killed, but the survivors were the ones that ate it and made it.

Cheese, after all, is spoiled milk.

Almost all dangerous bacteria develops in temperatures between 40 and 140 degrees, so as long as you keep the stew hot enough it's likely to be fine: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and...

To add to this, the ones that survive outside that range are typically anaerobic and can't survive being exposed to air, so that makes it even less likely to be a vector for food poisoning

2 ways bacteria/fungi hurt people: excreting toxins or by colonizing us.

The 140 degree rule basically stops all colonizers since anything that lives in those temps probably isn't planning to infect us.

But some extremophile that takes hold in the hot soup could still excrete toxins that build up over time

I'm not sure there's anything in the intersection of: "grows in boiling water" , "exists outside of the deep sea or other exotic places" , "hurts humans" and "is at _all_ common".

If there is, it has to be a really short list.

Food goes bad when either there are microbes growing in it (you get sick from infection), or there have been microbes growing and those microbes have left behind toxins (you get poisoned).

Nothing can remain alive in a boiling pot of stew, the few things that can survive have very specialized habitats. So the only things you have to worry about are non-living poisons: toxins and prions. Since these by definition cannot reproduce, it’s only a problem if the food was spoiled before it went in the stew.

The chance of encountering a toxin goes to 100% as more and more food is added, but it will be dilute, no different to consuming food just before it goes bad.

Spores will survive boiling, that's why autoclaves (pressure cookers) are used in medical research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoclave.

But spores are in a state of dormancy, so if you never stop boiling the broth, then spores never grow into anything. The most dangerous thing would probably be to boil the broth in stops in starts

Depending on the circumstances, boiling in stops and starts may not be too bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndallization

That is amazing! So basically you trick the bacteria into exiting their spore/dormant phase before you hit them again with another boil.

It seems risky because if you ever let the spores divide at all then you introduce further variation and a selection process into the mix, which could be disastrous.

But that reminds me of the "shock and kill" strategy used to get HIV out of its latent state before killing the virions: https://clinicalinfo.hiv.gov/en/glossary/shock-and-kill-stra...

And I guess this effect is also why chemotherapy drugs work best on fast-growing tumors.

I've heard from a friend of a friend that mycologists soak their grow mediums for a day or two to give spores a chance to germinate before pressure-cooking the whole thing. But said friend never called it Tyndallization. That's the thing I learned today!

Before refrigeration people were a lot less picky about what was considered spoiled food. One of my grandmothers would never look at the dates, but just trusted her eyes, nose and tongue as to whether something was fit for consumption or not, regardless of how much it was past the 'best before' date.

Best before not bad after

The labels include "best before", "sell by", and "use by", and they don't mean the same thing.

This is a great listen/read:

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/28/1114335397/expiration-dates-l...

NPR Expiration dates lead to lots of food waste, though these dates vary widely by state July 28, 20225:14 PM ET Heard on All Things Considered

Back in my dumpster diving days, I discovered how useful the sense of smell can be. Surprisingly, using it to detect bad food also changed the way I enjoyed good food. It became very pleasurable to eat fresh food!

It works most of the time, but not always, traditions around food are important. Rice is particularly insidious, rice grains carry Bacillus cereus spores that germinate after cooking. The trouble is that that particular bug grows at fridge temperatures and generates a heat-stable exotoxin. Any prepared rice older than 24 hours has the potential to give you really roaring diarrhea, even if it doesn't taste off.

Good tip, thank you!

Wait so even if rice goes directly from the cooker to the refrigerator, it should be eaten within 24 hours? I break this rule all the time, no diarrhea yet

yeah, weird... i reheat leftover rice all the time, both plain or say pilaf leftovers, and haven't had any problems yet...

Good luck to both of you.

had to actually look that up:

According to FoodSafety.gov FoodKeeper App, leftover rice can be stored in the refrigerator for three to four days

(my foodkeeper said 4-6 days)

and the FDA is typically on the paranoid side of things, like recommending to toss chicken in a couple of hours.

The British NHS is much more conservative, they recommend one day: https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/can...

Food poisoning from improper handling of rice is sufficiently common to have inspired studies on the risk. Here's one that's thorough from an age when public health still mattered: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130471/. The meat is on p. 440 - 10^5 - 10^8 colony-forming units is danger territory. Note - it's not the bacteria themselves that cause symptoms, it's an exotoxin that sends people to the bathroom, don't kid yourself into believing you "have immunity" or something.

It's really a mystery why the government is so incautious with the matter, food poisoning in the very young and elderly is life-threatening. If you are young and healthy you'll survive, but for 48 hours it's a beastly experience that you are better off without. My theory is institutional capture by business interests, after CDC shortened COVID isolation guidelines upon the insistence of the airline industry no one should ever believe a word from them ever again. Imagine people went off rice - it's big business in Arkansas!

I worked, as a teenager, in a Michelin starred hotel in the U.K. - they had, in the kitchen, an enormous stockpot, as tall as a man, which must have held 500 litres or more of stock, perpetually simmering. There was a stepladder to get up to chuck stuff (bones, vegetable scraps, you name it) in, and it had a tap at the bottom to fill smaller cauldrons from. It was explained to me that it had been going since the 50’s. Not quite ancient, but pretty elderly.

Long shift on a cold winter night, nothing beat a mug or two of that stock.

You can do this with whisky. When you have less than a couple of inches left, dump the remains into a decanter. Repeat with every bottle you buy. Occasionally drink some. Never let it empty.

It becomes your own personal blend, always changing. Lots of fun.

Came here to make a Ship-of-Theseus dad joke, beaten throughly to the punch.

Same. "Soup of Theseus" is an amazing term.

It’s ok, just add a bit more orange juice or whatever. ;)

Cozy is the perfect word and I find myself noting often that the things I naturally find to be cozy are related somehow to finding small portals of comfort in order to make surviving in a harsh world a little easier, developed by people over the millennia.

Not quite the same as Ship of Theseus because the soup will never be fully replaced. The will always be some bits of the original – no matter how small – hanging around forever.

the dilution level is presumably not the same, so I’m nitpicking, but technically it could be like with omeopathy [1], where the initial substance can be so diluted it is guaranteed that there is no trace of it at the molecular level in the final preparation.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_and_efficacy_of_hom...

We had a salad like that for a while but I think it was in danger of becoming a serious health risk after a week or so.

Yeah, you can only do it with hot foods that are effectively being constantly sterilised.

Interesting idea. Really fast food because it's so slow.

I just had my first cup of Brunswick Stew the other day. Extremely delicious and was as cozy as you said.

My dad would tell me of roadside chili houses in the southwestern USA (Texas, California, etc.) that always had a pot of chili going that they would ladle out to hungry travelers. The meat in the chili supposedly varied according to what was available: usually beef, pork, or roadkill.

Sounds disgusting and unhealthy. May as well drink stomach acid. There is something about freshness of food not just sterility.

I think the coziness of this recipe might be tempered somewhat by the fun food-borne illnesses that would have to spring up doing this.

I think if it is brought to a boil every hour it should be safe-ish

how do they manage to avoid that in the article? they list at least three different restaurants that serve these long-running soups, surely they don't poison their customers?

The article mentions keeping it at or above 200 degrees.

As others have said throughout these comments, as long as you keep the temperature high constantly, it won't be an issue.

Bacteria won't survive in simmering water, so time alone will not cause it to go bad. The toxins that bacteria produce can survive, which means tainted ingredients being added might spoil it, but as always, the poison is in the dose. With a large enough pot, a couple pieces of spoiled food likely won't cause illness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com