Whether your whole face is dried and cracking from the side effects of your stacked cold meds or from the bone-dry and bitter cold, solace may be found in a bowl of soup or a pot of stew. It steams, it heats, and, as our Food Editor Allie Lewis Clapp demonstrated yesterday on Today, its easy to make. But where do these warming words come from? Why do we call soup “soup” and stew “stew”? How much history can really exist in four short letters?
Well start with soup, since its story (like its broth) is clearer. The word started out in the Germanic family, from a root thats since grown into modern words like “supper,” “sup,” and “sop,” and that originally meant “consume something liquid.” This hopped over to Latin at some point before the 6th century to mean, specifically, a piece of bread eaten in a broth, a suppa. This then bopped along into French, where it started to mean both the broth-soaked bread and the broth itself. After a linguistic long jump across the English Channel in the 17th century (and a concurrent vogue for breadless broths), the word came to us, and we started making “soups” instead of “pottages” or “broths.” “Sop,” just the piece of bread, had been hanging out in English since the at least the 11th century, but it took some fancy French pronunciation to make us recognize the broth as a soup unto itself.
Stews path to modern crockpots, though, gets a little hazy right from the get-go. The first time that the Old French word estuve jumped to English shores as “stew,” it meant either a stove, a heated room, or a cooking cauldron. That probably comes from way back, from the Latin extufare, meaning “evaporate,” whose roots waft even further back to the Greek word typhos, “smoke.”
But back to stews. In the cauldron sense, the shift from container to contained seems easy enough, but our linguistic ancestors had to go and make things weird. Before anyone called the actual food in a stew “stew,” they started using the word for public steam baths. And soon after, given the occasionally unsavory atmosphere of public baths, “stew” became a slang term for a brothel. On the verb side “to stew” meant “take a steam” before it meant “cook something,” though the gap between the two was only a few decades in the 1400s. Back to the noun, though, it took until all the way in the middle of the 18th century for stewed food to be called plain old “stew.” Its hard to know why it took so long to make the leap from “food cooked by stewing” to “stew,” but Im guessing that “stew”s popularity as slang for whorehouses (and their employees) slowed things down. “Ive made a nice beef hooker for dinner,” isnt the most appetizing phrase in the language.
The world’s oldest known evidence of stew was found in Japan, dating to the Jōmon period. Amazonian tribes used the shells of turtles as vessels, boiling the entrails of the turtle and various other ingredients in them.
The risqué origins of stews name lie in the final definition of the Old French estuve — a heated room. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, English speakers began using the word stew in the late 1300s in reference to a public bath house. Bon Appétit picks up the story from there, explaining that the name stew was eventually transferred from bathhouses to brothels, due to the nude link between the two. To make matters even more scandalous, the Etymology Dictionary adds that, even before the term referred to a meal, “stewed” was used to refer to a state of drunkenness. Its unsavory news for a savory dish.
Stew seems as innocent as any dish could be, a wholesome family meal whose quaint name even evokes a sense of Americana. But it turns out that you might not want your parents at the table if youre talking about the origins of the dish, or at least, its name. The food itself has an ancient origin that predates its risqué moniker by many millennia.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the familiar dish of slow-simmered meat didnt get the name “stew” until 1756. The word had first emerged around four centuries prior, but it originally referred to something quite different. As Bon Appétit explains, etymologists trace the word stew back to the Old French word estuve, which referred to a cauldron, stove, or heated room. This word was rooted in the Latin extufare, meaning “evaporate,” which was in turn borrowed from the Greek word typhos, meaning “smoke.”
One of the oldest written recipes ever discovered is a cuneiform tablet from the Babylonian Empire evidently instructing the reader to make lamb stew, per the BBC. The ingredients used at the time, which included barley cakes, garlic, and leeks, are all available today, and the methods used remain fundamentally unchanged some 4,000 years later. Frustratingly for historians, the tablets do not specify what proportions to use for any of the ingredients, so researchers must use trial and error to reconstruct the recipes, carefully minding the texture to ensure that their stew does not become a soup.
But back to stews. In the cauldron sense, the shift from container to contained seems easy enough, but our linguistic ancestors had to go and make things weird. Before anyone called the actual food in a stew “stew,” they started using the word for public steam baths. And soon after, given the occasionally unsavory atmosphere of public baths, “stew” became a slang term for a brothel. On the verb side “to stew” meant “take a steam” before it meant “cook something,” though the gap between the two was only a few decades in the 1400s. Back to the noun, though, it took until all the way in the middle of the 18th century for stewed food to be called plain old “stew.” Its hard to know why it took so long to make the leap from “food cooked by stewing” to “stew,” but Im guessing that “stew”s popularity as slang for whorehouses (and their employees) slowed things down. “Ive made a nice beef hooker for dinner,” isnt the most appetizing phrase in the language.
Stews path to modern crockpots, though, gets a little hazy right from the get-go. The first time that the Old French word estuve jumped to English shores as “stew,” it meant either a stove, a heated room, or a cooking cauldron. That probably comes from way back, from the Latin extufare, meaning “evaporate,” whose roots waft even further back to the Greek word typhos, “smoke.”
Whether your whole face is dried and cracking from the side effects of your stacked cold meds or from the bone-dry and bitter cold, solace may be found in a bowl of soup or a pot of stew. It steams, it heats, and, as our Food Editor Allie Lewis Clapp demonstrated yesterday on Today, its easy to make. But where do these warming words come from? Why do we call soup “soup” and stew “stew”? How much history can really exist in four short letters?
Well start with soup, since its story (like its broth) is clearer. The word started out in the Germanic family, from a root thats since grown into modern words like “supper,” “sup,” and “sop,” and that originally meant “consume something liquid.” This hopped over to Latin at some point before the 6th century to mean, specifically, a piece of bread eaten in a broth, a suppa. This then bopped along into French, where it started to mean both the broth-soaked bread and the broth itself. After a linguistic long jump across the English Channel in the 17th century (and a concurrent vogue for breadless broths), the word came to us, and we started making “soups” instead of “pottages” or “broths.” “Sop,” just the piece of bread, had been hanging out in English since the at least the 11th century, but it took some fancy French pronunciation to make us recognize the broth as a soup unto itself.
Beef Stew From 1775
FAQ
Is stew Irish or Scottish?
Where does stew beef come from?
What is the origin of vegetable stew?
What country is known for beef stew?
Where did stew come from?
In 1855 the Petersburg Intelligencer explained the stew’s origin, noting that “in the good old county of Brunswick” it was popular during the hot summers “to repair almost every Saturday to some spring, to spend half the day.”
What is the source of stevia?
Stevia sweeteners are derived from the leaves of the Stevia rebaudiana (Bertoni) plant, a herbal shrub native to South America. Stevia is approximately 200 times sweeter than sugar and gets its sweetness from natural compounds in the stevia plant called steviol glycosides.
What is a stew & how do you make it?
A stew is a combination of solid food ingredients that have been cooked in liquid and served in the resultant gravy. Ingredients can include any combination of vegetables and may include meat, especially tougher meats suitable for slow-cooking, such as beef, pork, venison, rabbit, lamb, poultry, sausages, and seafood.
Where did Warwick stew come from?
The Brunswick News ran a picture of Warwick standing next to the stew pot at the Welcome Center and pointing to the inscription on its base. In February 1988, the Glynn County Commission approved its own resolution declaring Brunswick, Georgia, to be the place of origin of the famous stew.