Brunswick Stew: A Primer

The origin of Brunswick stew is a hotly contested topic, and no fewer than three geographic entities—two counties in Virginia and North Carolina and a town in Georgia—all claim to be where the dish was first created. The Georgia partisans have a very physical piece of evidence to support their case: a historical monument outside of the town of Brunswick consisting of a 25-gallon iron pot affixed to a stone base with the inscription, “In this pot the first Brunswick Stew was made on St. Simon Isle, July 2 1898.”

Photo by Ebyabe via CC BY-SA 3.0

Now, it may well be true that the first Brunswick stew made on St. Simons was cooked in that very pot, but even if so, it would not have been the first Brunswick stew ever cooked—not by a long shot. By 1898 the famous concoction had been a staple of Virginia barbecues for many decades.

Brunswick stew appears in newspaper accounts of barbecues in the Old Dominion as far back as the 1840s. In 1849, the Alexandria Gazette described Brunswick stew as “a genuine South-side dish, composed of squirrels, chicken, a little bacon, and corn and tomatoes, ad libitum.”

The most likely story is that Brunswick stew was popularized and perhaps even created by a man named James Matthews. A former soldier in the War of 1812 and something of a rolling stone, Matthews bounced around Brunswick County, Virginia, mooching off friends as a household guest and performing odd jobs for his hosts. Matthews was a great squirrel hunter, and an account written in 1886 remembered that, “it was his way of cooking the squirrels which gained him such popularity and eclat with the ladies.”

Matthews started making his stew around 1820 following a very simple recipe. He cooked the squirrels in water with bacon and onions until the flesh separated from the bones, then he skimmed out the bones and finished the stew with butter and breadcrumbs. After his death, Matthews was succeeded by a line of other stew masters, and over time they added tomato, onion, corn, and potatoes to the recipe. By the 1840s the dish had spread beyond Brunswick county and had become a staple side dish at barbecues throughout Virginia.

The stew soon snuck its way down into North Carolina and, eventually, all the way Georgia, too, where it took on a very strong identity as the standard accompaniment for a chopped pork sandwich. Brunswick stew is a popular barbecue side dish throughout North Carolina and in eastern Tennessee, too.

These days, there’s no single standard Brunswick stew recipe that’s used in any one region. The meats used include chicken, pork, and sometimes even beef and, on increasingly rare occasions, game meat like the original squirrel. The vegetables typically include onions, potatoes, corn, and limas, but various cooks also incorporate peas, carrots, green beans, and just about anything else from the vegetable garden (or from the canned veggie aisle of the supermarket, for that matter). In the Carolinas, Brunswick stew is generally pretty heavy on the tomato, ranging from of a generous portion of tomato chunks incorporated into the stew to a full tomato soup-like base. Down in Georgia, the stew is cooked for hours on end until all the constituent parts break down into a smooth, consistent whole.

But, despite its wide popularity and what certain iron pots down in Georgia may claim, it all got started up in Virginia.