Perpetual Stew and Riffing on Rituals
Folktales but make it 2023
✨ Thank you for joining the community craft conga line that is GROUP HUG. So glad you are here. ✨
A group of bedraggled travelers arrives in town with only an empty pot. They’re hungry, but they only have that one pot. Nary a bouillon cube between the bunch! They decide to get a little passive aggressive, a little sneaky, and fill the pot with river water and a large stone and get to simmering. They start making yummy sounds, probably. When a villager asks what’s cooking (jealous!), the travelers say that they’re making Stone Soup. They say it is delicious. But it could be better: with a little garnish, it would be even more delicious, and they would share. Drooling, the villager goes home and grabs a carrot to add to the soup. Someone else fetches a potato. Then some cabbage. The soup has become a real soup! Suddenly, everyone in the village is slurping up a soup they made together!
What if I told you this same thing essentially happened, and has been happening for 47 days straight, in a Brooklyn playground right now?
Would you feel the smallest shimmer of glee in your weary heart? I did too. Don’t feel embarrassed! GLEE IS OKAY!
I have a theory on why this especially #sparksglee but first, some background:
Perpetual Stew is an accidental community potluck that began with Annie Rauwerda hosting consecutive “stew nights” for friends at her Brooklyn apartment in June. Crockpot cranked on high, they’d continue to feed the same stew, like a sourdough starter or compost pile or my cat’s disgusting plate of always-unfinished wet food, with whatever ingredients were brought that night. They started promoting it a bit, moved outside to Fermi Playground, and now the stew is almost in its seventh week of simmering thanks to dozens of people bringing single carrots, homemade spice mix, and small baggies of sweet potatoes to add to the pot. Hundreds of people go and sip their soup out of Dixie cups.
There’s a beef noodle soup that’s been simmering in Bangkok for 49 years, soups that roiled for weeks in medieval taverns glistening with pigeon meat, boiled eggs and fishcakes cooking in 60-year-old dashi in Tokyo since 1945. Perpetual Stew is not new. It is definitely not new to people outside of the United States. The inspiration for the whole thing was actually the perpetual stew Wikipedia article (Annie is also @depthsofwikipedia), a random “wouldn’t that be fun to do?” thought at the height of the pandemic dreaming of days of togetherness and sharing meals together again.
And I think it’s because of that long history, that Stone Soup folktale that we’ve had baked into our brains from dozens of retellings and references and Shel Silverstein riffing, that makes this current day experience so delightful. Especially when it relies on multiple people to sustain together. It feels like a return to something good and wholesome and simple. Alone, we have one carrot, but together we make a stew whose flavors intensify over several months.
It came together simply and without pomp. News spread through word of mouth and flyers and now is unfortunately viral on TikTok. There is a simple website and that website documents the daily stew progression like a sailor at sea in his salt-eaten diary (“June 12, 2023: Added dill that someone brought last night. Boy was that a mistake.”) There is a 2,000 word About section that details the history of perpetual stews throughout myth, medieval times, family culture, and history.
There is a log of ingredients brought – corn, kohlrabi, one can of white beans – and a power ranking of the best ingredients so far.
The archival process is happening right before our eyes; this stew is one stew in a long line of stew aunts and uncles and stew grandpas.
The real Perpetual Stew is the act of ritual in itself; reading old folktales, plunging the depths of Wikipedia, hearing a kooky story your grandmother tells you about an old family tradition, and riffing on it for yourself. For current times. For your next birthday party or community gathering. Share the history and talk about the people that led you here; it will make everything better and more meaningful to know you’re in a long line of human tradition.
Why start from scratch when the very best ways we’ve gathered have been held in story for millennia? What if we didn’t clean the pot? It might be a better idea to add some peppers to the stock and keep cooking.
What if you shared this with someone you want to make a 65 year old stew with?