Perpetual stew and friends

Sometimes we just eat leftovers, right? I expect everyone does that. But sometimes leftovers are an ingredient in another dish. Yesterday's stir-fry becomes today's fried rice. Yesterday's chili goes into today's nachos. Leftover roasted broccoli goes into a frittata. Etc, etc, etc. But what if you keep doing that? Can you do it forever?

I think I first ran across this idea, outside of my own head, in the Wikipedia article on pottage: "[Pottage] could be kept over the fire for a period of days, during which time some of it could be eaten, and more ingredients added. The result was a dish that was constantly changing." I found this idea electrifying and started practicing these evolving stews from time to time, never running it "forever" but for a week or two until I'd burn a pot or let it putrefy, or we just got tired of stew. Much more recently, perpetual stew came to my attention which is a better, more specific term. I found web-pages suggesting that no one has ever done this and if they had, it would have killed them, but I don't buy that, particularly in the face of several modern examples.

Somewhere along the way, probably due to my explorations of fermentation, I'd read up on the manufacture of balsamic and was enchanted by the progression made through the barrel sets, and I went on to read about the more generic solera process for a variety of products. The way that these products are mixed and remixed over time is directly adjacent to that evolving perpetual stew. I make fermented hot sauces and once I'd dug into solera operation techniques, the idea of solera-built hot sauce has seemed like a super-cool project (though this remains aspirational as I have yet to either budget for it or take up coopering).

And then, a few years ago, I watched the Enrique Olvera episode of Chef's Table on Netflix where he talks about his mole madre. They make a mole and then use it until it gets low, reserving the remainder to be added to a new batch the next day. Each batch is made with seasonally-changing ingredients so it's always changing but also always retaining its past. There was a big hoopla when the mole reached 1000 days old and it's several years older now.

Another related practice: I bake sourdough bread and ferment yogurt using perpetual cultures that I keep alive, the microbial communities (and even the milk/flour used) changing over time.

Stretching things just a little farther, I see how this relates to my development of crop landraces. The stew of genetics in my field corn shifts year to year, narrowing as it becomes better adapted to my land, climate, and practices, and widening as I swap seeds with other growers or purchase some variety I want to toss into the mix.

So anyway, what's your relationship to this constellation of practices? Do you manage a perpetual stew? Does perpetual stew have any other 'friends' that I haven't thought of?

I can see it with fermented foods, but not sure about stew.  Suppose I made beef stew the first day, and just kept adding stuff.  After two weeks, some of the beef and initial ingredients would be two weeks old.  If I leave leftover stew in my fridge for two weeks, it will be growing mold.  Wouldn't it still be happening in the two week old stuff, just "watered down" by the new additions?

The way I think about that is that each time you bring it to a solid boil, or simmer it for 20 minutes, you're resetting the clock on pathogen colonization. In my experience, if I cook it every day, it always smells and tastes fresh. But when we get sick of it or distracted and then it sits in the fridge for three days, it might start smelling funky so we toss it. Also, historically, I'm imagining a big kettle hanging over the fire in an inglenook or whatever, so it's more or less always too hot for microbial assault.

I messed around with perpetual stew (for myself only; DW was away). I did not get sick, only got tired of it and fed the last to the dogs.

The whole idea is that it's brought to a boil twice per day, which in theory pasteurizes everything and knocks the bacteria/mold back to zero (or at least harmless levels).

EDIT: Ah, Christopher beat me to it. Great minds ...

Ha! just posted this in the friendship cake thread. I remember having a 'Herman' cake as a child....

I like the perpetual stew link Christopher.  I'm pretty sure that if you were lucky enough to have left overs in olden times they wouldn't have been thrown away, but added to and re heated!

Nancy Reading wrote:I'm pretty sure that if you were lucky enough to have left overs in olden times they wouldn't have been thrown away, but added to and re heated!

Yeah. I had a blurb in the first version of my post about how lucky we are to be able to just get tired of eating something and throw it away. I decided it was a distraction from the main thrust, but it's still true.

Perpetual stew would never work at my house since dear hubby will only eat something for two days.

I remember reading about how the pioneers carried a stewpot with something in it from one place to another.

In one story a lady went to rescue someone stuck up in the mountains and took her stew pot with her.

Thanks for a very entertaining thread.

Anne Miller wrote:dear hubby will only eat something for two days.

Do you mean he's afraid of food poisoning and two days is his safety cutoff? Or that he gets tired of eating the same old thing again? If it's the latter, you might be able to change it up enough to seem like a whole other thing.

It is called perpetual chili at our place.  
My husband came up with this idea when we were first married.  The crockpot would have the original chili in it, we'd usually eat about half, then just keep adding leftover ingredients from other dishes.  
It is surprisingly good....until it isn't.  I think the longest one we had running was ... 3 weeks?  I still shudder when I think of that.

The evolution of the flavor profile is interesting.  Eventually, it makes its own flavor...nothing can really be attributed to any of the other ingredients.

I do a version of this idea. All summer, I put leftovers into saved glass peanut butter jars and keep them in the freezer. We have so many fresh vegetables, that there's no reason to eat them as leftovers. Besides veggies, I add meat, gravy, grains, beans, deglazing from cooking pans, cheese, cooking water from veggies, etc. Every flavorful little tidbit gets put into a soup jar.

When cold weather comes, I defrost a jar and dump it into a pot. I add a pint of bone broth and any other leftovers I find in the fridge. This simmers on the woodstove all morning and we eat it for lunch. We rarely eat it all, so after it cools I put the pot into the fridge and add another jar of defrosted leftovers to it the next day. Even though I'm adding to, it's different every day. This is my husband's favorite lunch.

This is a real thing and it works. About a year ago I remember watching a video about a soup restaurant in Asia somewhere that has been cooking the same soup for decades. I tried to find it after reading this thread and it turns out there are several soup shops serving decades old soup. I linked a video about one of them before

Personally, since I don't have a pot of soup cooking daily, I usually take leftovers that aren't claimed for lunch the next day and freeze them. Then I toss them into the next pot of soup. And so on. This cycle usually only makes it through 4-5 iterations of soups, stews, and chilis before we end up with a meal that is just precisely enough that there are no leftovers.

I grew up among a community of Romani people. One family had three sons. They cooked and heated with wood and had no electricity. In the back yard there was a small shed under which sat a cast iron 'wash pot'. The youngest son's job was to split firewood and keep the stew simmering in the pot. They did have a wood fired cook stove but only used it in the colder weather. The two older sons were charged with acquiring ingredients for the stew. They hunted rabbits, squirrels, ducks, raccoons, and more. anything that was edible went into the pot. They raided neighborhood gardens at night and foraged during the day. I never knew them to get ill from eating that stew. What I thought was the strangest thing they did was to pick up cigarette buts until they had enough to swipe a biscuit from the kitchen and eat 'tobacco sandwiches'. Yuck!

I did a version of this as a young adult earning little money.  I'd never heard of it, it just came naturally to me.  I lived in an apartment with another single woman and her 2 young kids.  She would cook dinner for them, they would eat most of it, and any leftovers would be thrown in the trash or put down the garbage disposal.  Being raised in a home where perfectly good food was never thrown out, I was appalled at this, and told her to put their leftovers into a plastic container and stick it in the fridge and I would eat it later.  From that day forward I had "free" dinners, which helped my meager budget greatly.   She added leftovers from each day to the same container and I would reheat it all when I got home from work.  She once said with a sour face that she couldn't understand how I could eat that stuff all mixed together, and I told her that oddly enough, it was really good!  The flavors do meld and enhance each other.

Fast forward to the present day, over the last few years it has become a running joke with my mom that I keep trying to ruin soup, but just can't manage it!  In cooler weather we have soup for supper, and often I will combine different leftover soups, veggies from our noon main meal, etc. and make a new meal out of it.  Haven't had a bad combo yet, and nothing gets wasted!

Nancy Reading wrote:Ha! just posted this in the friendship cake thread. I remember having a 'Herman' cake as a child....

That's funny: We had Hermann as well. I thought it was a German invention (land of sourdough breads) but apparently not.
With bread I often keep a rest of dough instead of (or in addition to) sourdough and before baking pinch off a bit for the next baking. But if I bake with seeds or dairy products I don't keep that rest.

For stew I don't think it would work in my family. Apart from my husband and myself there are no soup eaters unless it is about Ramen soup (our exchange son from Latin America said he will miss my Ramen soup).
But in theory this sounds like a doable routine and was often practiced I guess.

Christopher Weeks wrote:

Anne Miller wrote:dear hubby will only eat something for two days.

Do you mean he's afraid of food poisoning and two days is his safety cutoff? Or that he gets tired of eating the same old thing again? If it's the latter, you might be able to change it up enough to seem like a whole other thing.

It is the latter.  He would like meals to be something different every day.  He will tolerate something for two days, though not his wishes.

With something like a perpetual stew, I don't think it can be changed enough to disguise that it has been over two days.  He would say something like, I know what you are trying to do.

We tried keeping a perpetual stock pot for a while. He kept a crock pot plugged in and kept adding scraps and water to it. The problem was we didn't take any scraps out and ended up with too much solid and not enough liquid and we weren't great at keeping the water level up so the stuff on top would burn and ruin the rest of it. Squash rinds and seeds we're the worst for this as they would burn and add a really bad flavor and the seeds we're hard to find and pull out. I think we got it to last about a month.

Yeah, actually, when I do this, it's stove-top and most often, it ends up being ruined because it gets a little burned and stuck to the bottom. And then it's stuck there to burn more and more each meal, eventually making everything in the pot nasty. I've kept stuff like this going for 2-3 weeks several times but I'd really like to up my game.

Bump / poke ...

I wonder if this could be connected to the folks who run a crockpot from direct solar and cook a meal. Could perpetual stew be the ultimate dump load for PV solar setups?

I was just reading R Ranson's great post about the history of puddings -- steamed and boiled. And this paragraph about the boiling water made me think of it as a neat 'friend' of perpetual stew:

r ranson wrote:What happens when we boil a pudding?  When we boil something, we submerge the item in water that is at or around 100C.  We usually keep this at or just below a roiling boil, so the temp of the water is quite hot.  Food moves around, water moves around, but the temperature is consistant.  The food loses some of the flavour to the water and what is dissolved in the water gives the flavour back to the food.   Think about pasta cooked in salted vs unsalted water.  It's surprising how much flavour the water can add to the pasta with just a touch of salt.

We've kept a perpetual stock pot on the back burner for decades. It's hardly a novel idea, as the practice goes back centuries, at least in Europe. It's a wonderful way to use vegetable ends and tops, and nothing works better to rid bones of meat and gristle. The broth is always on hand for making soups and sauces, deglazing pans, sautéing veggies, and even poaching eggs. We only change it out when it gets filled up with more solid than liquid. Then we strain it all and use the juice to start the next batch of broth.

The bones and other undissolved material goes right into the compost pile. I have a bone bucket close by to save whatever skeletal remains are sifted out later. These are almost always buried beneath our tomato plants to prevent blossom end rot and add potassium and phosphorus. Other than coffee grounds, green mulch, and a little Vitamin P,  I never have to add fertilizer to the tomatoes.

 We've kept a perpetual stock pot on the back burner for decades

Although I love this idea I can't imagine how to keep it going in the summertime?
We cook every day but when the weather warms it all happens early and the kitchen is 'closed' for cooking by 8am...cold lunches....it gets too hot in our house...no ac, just fans.

I suppose if we had a summer kitchen or the outdoor wood cook stove like we used for summertime cooking and canning in the seventies.....

Are you heatiing it up just the once every day as Christopher mentions or on a low simmer continuously?

I'll look forward to giving it a try next winter!

Judith Browning wrote:
Are you heatiing it up just the once every day as Christopher mentions or on a low simmer continuously?

We have an electric stove. It's the first thing I turn on in the morning, the smallest burner on the lowest setting with the lid on tight, and it usually is bubbling by noon. We turn it off at bedtime, and it stays warm through the night. Our kitchen is on the shady side of the house, so the heat isn't really noticeable in summer, but it's definitely a bonus heater in winter.

My mom and grandma always had a pot on the wood stove all winter.  
One week it might seem like a soup, the next it had migrated into a stew.  I do remember mom transferring the contents into a different kettle every couple weeks so she could clean it.

When I got married we would keep a soup pot on the wood stove for a couple weeks until my wife said "NO MORE SOUP",  then a couple weeks later it was back. lol

I have 4 sons and took them to hunting camp when they were still in diapers.  They grew up at camp with a continuous stew pot on the stove.
Now they are grown they do the same.

At camp we always had a nice selection of spices and vegetables so anyone could add what they thought it needed whenever they wanted.  I can only remember one time we had to "toss" it.

Always a good selection of meat for the stew.   Forty plus years of camp and never was there a lack of meat hanging.

Mom used to make "potage": It was essentially whatever veggies she had on hand, sometimes pureed, with some sort of meat. She could make it last about a week, adding more veggies, and I must say that the 2nd or 3rd day was always better than the first day, as the flavors would "marry" as we say in France.
This said, I do not know anyone who has enjoyed eating potage for a month, no matter how good: One gets tired of essentially the same fare, the same consistency (pre-chewed and liquidy), essentially, for a whole week.
The other problem is that in order to keep it free of bacteria, you have to keep it hot enough to kill the bacteria. Perhaps, in the winter, if you have a woodstove that you must keep burning anyway to keep warm, that might be doable. If you need to keep the fire active, you may have to think about the amount of fire wood. needed. That may not save any money.
We are also talking about very long ago, when folks didn't add much meat at all in their stew (as the meat would spoil first).
I have my doubts that the potage in question would retain vitamins, as we know that vitamins can get lost in a long cooking period. In 1772, the potato tuber was declared useful by the Faculte de medecine, and even so, the introduction of a solanum was thought as risky. Cabbage was pretty much THE vegetable of choice when all was frozen outside.
Many peasants in France didn't have any meat, unless they raised their own. Even so, Taxes were often paid in kind to the lord of the castle, and peasant often made do without meat. It was Henri IV (1553- 1610) who decreed that there should be a "poule au pot" (A hen in the pot) at least once a week so the lords of the castle could not take everything in taxes). So they had large flocks, like 56 chickens (for 56 weeks), running wild. They could eat the eggs.
Those were not good old times to be romanticized and go back to: The last famine in France was in 1870, I believe. Folks caught rats from their sewer to feed themselves, attacked a zoo, killed an elephant, and a restaurateur was arrested for cooking the trunk for his guests.
At my home, of 2 things one: if the potage was good, it didn't last. If it didn't disappear, mom would add some savory meat ("pour le ratrapper" = to "catch it back",) so she would not have to toss it.
We never bought dog food, and my dog was never hungry, as we knew how to put it out in the garage so mom would not see it.

Yes Judith a summer kitchen is the answer: mine is simply an apartment sized upright freezer directly outside the door that doubles as a countertop, where single burners and crockpots can be used without heating up the house.

Ra Kenworth wrote:Yes Judith a summer kitchen is the answer: mine is simply an apartment sized upright freezer directly outside the door that doubles as a countertop, where single burners and crockpots can be used without heating up the house.

That's what our roofed unscreened back porch is....an occasional crockpot and even more occasionally a one burner hot plate.  Mostly though it's our shady afternoon hang out in the glider and watch butterflies and then also a place to hang the laundry on rainy days...and some daily use garden tools, seedlings in flats, cat hangout.....

I am not comfortable leaving a pot of something for very long out there without a better 'kitchen' counter (mine is an old metal ironing board).
lt's another great idea to try on a long list of great ideas..I do intend to come up with a hay box cooker before the summer's over though 😊

Ra Kenworth wrote:Yes Judith a summer kitchen is the answer: mine is simply an apartment sized upright freezer directly outside the door that doubles as a countertop, where single burners and crockpots can be used without heating up the house.

That's a wonderful idea. I'm planning to do the something very similar.
There's a concrete fire circle that we are not using, about 20 ft in diameter. I plan to add cattle panels all around to make an airy enclosure, maybe with some grapevines all around then put a roof on top, just to protect the equipment.
I  think the roof will be a fairly cheap affair as they sell on the internet some super duper heavy tarps, reclaimed from advertising panels along the highway.  This:
https://www.billboardvinyls.com/products/14-x-48-reused-vinyl-tarp-black?variant=41687924244563&country=US¤cy=USD&utm_medium=product_sync&utm_source=google&utm_content=sag_organic&utm_campaign=sag_organic&tw_source=google&tw_adid=756680107359&utm_campaign=22641825750&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22641825750&gbraid=0AAAAADhQWtKKyt2dFNS2coBA3p0Yan5vU&gclid=Cj0KCQjwlqTRBhCBARIsANrkrxjs2zzmIQFlY3Lh9a0BX_H4V_cpiKHmvChKmVaFYOudivltar37JZwaAkeDEALw_wcB
will take you to the site.  You can then pick your size.
Billboard vinyl material is stronger and heftier than anything else you will find to cover your stuff: they usually double it, so that one face doesn't show the advertising
It would go directly over a round wood frame, supported by a number of 4" X 4" posts.
They have grommets and I could add more, just so I could fasten them more easily to the wood frame.
It's just too darn hot to do canning inside the house.
I built a little cabinet for the stove (concrete blocks and lumber to cover, and a  propane tank, and another for a counter top for a cutting and prepping place, so this project is humming along, but calculations are not my strong suite. With a 20' diameter, I wonder how many posts I would need, as this will impact the final shape of the roof.
Oh, I intend to keep the center of the roof open so that smoke/heat can dissipate if we burn marshmallows at the center of the fire circle.
The final piece that would close the roof could be a patio umbrella, removable.
Do we have good engineers on permies to tell me if I'm going totally wrong? I'm hoping that the roof would be high enough to not melt in the heat...