Lably
Skip to content

Stew

Dish of ingredients cooked in liquid

  • 7 min read
  • 3 chapters
lamb stew with leeks, lentils, yellow (heirloom) and orange carrots, rosemary, and other spices
FiveRings ( talk ) · CC BY 3.0

Related on Lably

Through Cooking, Vegetable and Rabbit

Stewing is suitable for the least tender cuts of meat that become tender and juicy with the slow, moist heat method. This makes it popular for low-cost cooking. Cuts with a certain amount of marbling and gelatinous connective tissue give moist, juicy stews, while lean meat may easily become dry.

Stews are thickened by reduction or with flour, either by coating pieces of meat with flour before searing or by using a roux or beurre manié, a dough consisting of equal parts fat and flour. Thickeners like cornstarch, potato starch, or arrowroot may also be used. Stew is very prominent in England, with beef stew and dumplings having been one of England's national dishes in the 14th century. Other European countries also have their own recipes.

History

Stews have been made since ancient times. The world's oldest known evidence of stew was found in Japan, dating to around 5000 BC during the Jōmon period. They made seafood whose ingredients varied with the seasons. The food was cooked in large conical or rounded pots with tapered or pointy bottoms that sat well in the soil and ash of the bonfire or hearth.

Amazonian tribes used the shells of turtles as vessels, boiling the entrails of the turtle and various other ingredients in them.

There are recipes for pork stews and fish stews in the Roman cookery book Apicius, believed to date from the 4th century AD. Le Viandier, one of the oldest cookbooks in French, written in the early 14th century by the French chef known as Taillevent, has ragouts or stews of various types in it.

Sign in to keep reading

2 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in Cooking, food and drink

Source and licence. Adapted from the Wikipedia article “Stew” (this version, 2026-09-14) by its contributors, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Lablypedia has left out its tables, references and most pictures, and linked it to other Lablypedia articles.