Perpetual stew facts for kids
Cocido montañés, a Cantabrian version of perpetual stew
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| Alternative names | Hunter's pot, hunter's stew |
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| Type | Stew |
A perpetual stew, also known as forever soup, hunter's pot or hunter's stew, is a pot into which whatever one can find is placed and cooked. The pot is never or rarely emptied all the way, and ingredients and liquid are replenished as necessary. The concept is often a common element in descriptions of medieval inns. Foods prepared in a perpetual stew have been described as being flavorful due to the manner in which the ingredients blend together.
Examples
Perpetual stews are speculated to have been common in medieval cuisine, often as pottage or pot-au-feu:
Bread, water or ale, and a companaticum ('that which goes with the bread') from the cauldron, the original stockpot or pot-au-feu that provided an ever-changing broth enriched daily with whatever was available. The cauldron was rarely emptied out except in preparation for the meatless weeks of Lent, so that while a hare, hen or pigeon would give it a fine, meaty flavour, the taste of salted pork or cabbage would linger for days, even weeks.
Between August 2014 and April 2015, a New York restaurant served broth from the same perpetual stew (a master stock) for over eight months.
A batch of pot-au-feu was claimed by one writer to be maintained as a perpetual stew in Perpignan from the 15th century until World War II, when it ran out of ingredients to keep the stew going due to the German occupation.
The tradition of perpetual stew is also kept alive in some Southern and Eastern Asian countries:
Wattana Panich restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand, has continued to maintain the broth from the same perpetual stew for over 50 years (as of 2025[update]).
The food industry in Japan still peruses perpetual stews, for instance in ramen (noodle dish) and oden (traditional one-pot dish): Otafuku, one of the oldest oden restaurants in Japan, has been heating up the same batch of broth every day since 1945.
One additional, contemporary example of the perpetual stew was maintained at Dayton House in Madison, WI from September 2009 to May 2010 by continuous use of a crock pot.
Ingredients
Various ingredients can be used in a perpetual stew, such as root vegetables and tubers (onion, carrot, garlic, parsnip, turnip, etc.) and various meats and game meats.
In popular culture
William Gibson references a perpetual stew served on the Bridge in his novel Idoru.
In A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, Arya eats from a perpetual stew, into which she contributes a pigeon, while in the slums of Kings Landing.
In the game Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the player can find pots of perpetual stew scattered around the map.
