Tedium - Nothing Lasts Forever 🥣

Today in Tedium: This week, this unbearable week. For the first time in the history of running this newsletter, I felt like I might have nothing to say. I just felt lost after seeing the destruction and willful idiocy that happened at the U.S. Capitol this week. (It wasn’t far from the neighborhood where I used to live.) The last couple of days have left me feeling a bit messed up and not sure what to say next, but a realization came over me recently: This is the finale of something, and not just the current American president, who for the first time in years is seeing many of his allies peel off. Culturally, this is a point of reset and renewal, as we close one stage and enter another. While things are broken, they will will get repaired. Things will begin anew. In that spirit, today’s Tedium is a general grab bag around the idea of renewal, and why, sometimes, you have to start over. — Ernie @ Tedium

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Perpetual stews: Why leaving something cooking forever sounds better than it actually is

For some reason, perhaps because I was attempting to cook soup as I started writing this piece, I started thinking about the idea of a stew that could continue cooking forever—an idea I’ve been familiar with forever, but seemed specifically relevant to this moment.

The idea kind of works like this: Basically, if you run a kitchen or inn of some kind, you take the extras from whatever you’re making—meat scraps, random veggies, you name it—and just keep throwing them in the stew, which is just going in a low boil for hours, days, months on end.

Eventually, all those parts melt together texturally, leaving a slurry of randomness that carries a fascinating flavor profile if done right.

Now, to be clear, a perpetual stew is a real thing, and real restaurants have done it. For example, Louro, a Portuguese-American restaurant in New York City during the first half of the 2010s, had won foodie attention for keeping a pot on the boil at all times—well, until the restaurant closed in 2015.

“Wait, all times,” you ask? “Isn’t that a health code violation waiting to happen?”

Well, here’s the thing. If something is always cooking, the bacteria that might usually form from something being out is unable to form, allowing the food to keep consistently evolving. Louro made a point of straining out the extra veggies and meats that appeared in the concoction, and then using that element for the basis of an ingredient used in its many foods.

Some restaurants have taken this fascinating idea and run with it. The Bangkok restaurant Wattana Panich has had a perpetual stew going for more than 45 years. And the recipe is honestly just a guess!

“Since my grandfather's time, we've never really had a set recipe about how much of each ingredient to put in,” third-generation soup creator Nattapong Kaweeantawong told NPR. “So the person making the soup will constantly have to taste it to know what needs to be added.”

This sounds cool! So what’s the problem? Well, there is a bit of history that is driving the phenomenon, and that history seems to be on somewhat shaky ground, notes the online men’s magazine MEL, noting that most histories of the “perpetual stew” seem to land on the same 1970s-era book. The article talks to historians who imply the legend of the pot always on the boil is akin to “fakelore,” and that the flavor and financial benefits of keeping a stew cooking forever are nonexistent.

Because this is Tedium, we will spend a little bit of time trying to confirm these details by diving into the internet to see if any history surfaces. And one way we can do so is by highlighting the fact that the term “perpetual stew” appears to have been in use—as an idiom, to describe people overly fixated on something—as far back as the 19th century.

But not entirely. For example, a British captain named William Bourchier wrote an 1834 travelogue about his journey from Bombay to England in which the concept of a perpetual stew is mentioned:

The evening being far advanced when we reached Kroceko, we had some difficulty in getting the Effendi to make his appearance; but at lasts little withered and wizard-looking old man, with sore eyes, became visible, and, after no inconsiderable demur, gave us leave to room for the night with the pigeons at the top of his house. He kept hundreds of these binds, which are very common all along the bank, of the Nile. To make some distinction, however, a mat was spread for us, a luxury which it did not appear the pigeons enjoyed; and thus we were sumptuously accommodated for the night. Nor was it long before supper arrived in the form of the universal and perpetual stew. This time it should have been better than usual, by containing more meat than won customary. But all excited expectations, even from the beauty of a beauty, down to the savour of an African stew, seem raised to be disappointed, and on it happened with us. But, to make amends, a Turk furnished us with some date brandy, for which we were very thankful; and we then laid ourselves down to sleep, with feelings of greater comfort and security than we had yet felt in Africa.

(Other forms of terminology, including “hunter’s stew” and “eternal pot,” do predate the 1970s, and describe the same general concept—a cooking pot in which random stuff is thrown inside a pot and continued as needed, not necessarily with an eternal flame assisting.)

A more recent document that seems to have set the concept of the perpetual stew ablaze is a 1981 New York Times article from the writer Arthur Prager, who seems to have uncovered 300-year-old examples of a cooking pot that constantly cooks down … without necessarily sourcing where said stew pot was. (Prager, meanwhile, had a claim on a 20-something-year-old eternal pot, according to him, which was based on an Alexandre Dumas recipe.)

The perpetual stew, whether or not it is something with a long history or just a concept that has gained recent prominence, nonetheless strikes one as a perfect metaphor for our times: Keeping something going forever sounds perfectly fascinating and romantic, but you probably wouldn’t want to do it yourself.