Winter is Brunswick Stew season: Get you some!

Brunswick stew is pure Southern comfort food…especially meant to be enjoyed on cold winter nights. A steamy-hot bowl is guaranteed to warm up your innards. The experience is like hugging yourself from the inside out.

One rarely stops with just one bowl of Brunswick stew, however…because it tastes SO Dagnabbit good!

The debate rages on – did Brunswick stew originate in Brunswick County, Va., or in Brunswick, Ga.?

The New York Times sent a crackerjack reporter – Ann Pringle Harris – to unravel the mystery in 1993.

She heard “lyrical accounts of open fires, black iron pots…and a mess of squirrel, rabbit and possum that somebody’s daddy brought home. Never mind that hardly anyone now alive has ever taken part in such a ritual – it’s all part of the legend.”

Harris reported: “Virginians think Georgia’s stew is too spicy. Georgians find Virginia’s stew too mushy and thick.”

Georgian Fran Kelly says: “Virginians cook their meat down to shreds and thicken the stew with potatoes. I’d call it more of a ‘chicken muddle.’”

Virginian John Drew Clary explains that in Virginia, “Brunswick stew is a full meal – we like it thick instead of soupy – whereas in Georgia, it is simply a side dish.”

Virginia places the invention of Brunswick stew in a hunting camp on the banks of the Nottoway River in upper Brunswick County in 1828. (Brunswick County abuts the North Carolina counties of Warren and Northampton. The three counties share access to Lake Gaston.)

The Commonwealth of Virginia erected a historic marker in 1997, located on U.S. Route 58 in Brunswick County, between Lawrenceville and Emporia. The text reads:

“According to local tradition, while Dr. Creed Haskins and several friends were on a hunting trip in Brunswick County in 1828, his camp cook, Jimmy Matthews, hunted squirrels for a stew. Matthews simmered the squirrels with butter, onions, stale bread and seasoning, thus creating the dish known as Brunswick stew. Recipes for Brunswick stew have changed over time as chicken has replaced squirrel, and vegetables have been added, but the stew remains thick and rich. Other states have made similar claims but Virginia’s is the first.”

On Feb. 22, 1988, the Virginia General Assembly authorized a Brunswick stew proclamation to reinforce the notion that Brunswick County is “the place of origin of this astonishing gastronomical miracle.”

Georgians, however, insist “their claim is as solid as the pot on which it rests,” Harris reported. In that cast iron pot, they say the first Brunswick stew was made in Glynn County in 1898. The 25-gallon pot is believed to have come from a former slave ship.”

Georgia has its own state marker located on Interstate 95 at milepost 40, thanks to an Eagle Scout project completed in 1988 by Christopher K. Jones of Troop 224, which is sponsored by Lakeside United Methodist Church in Brunswick. The wording is: “The first Brunswick Stew was made here in the Brunswick-Golden Isles area in early colonial days. It remains an American Favorite.”

“While Georgia and Virginia fight about Brunswick stew, North Carolina eats it,” Harris wrote.

“Indeed, the dish seems to be offered more frequently in restaurants below the North Carolina-Virginia border than above it,” she said.

Matthew Poindexter, a reporter with the Durham-based Indy Week, a weekly tabloid newspaper, offers an imaginary “certificate of origination” to Virginia, citing a published recipe, which appeared in an 1862 edition of the Southern Recorder newspaper, based in Milledgeville, Ga. The recipe was labeled “Virginia Stew.”

It takes a team to do the prep work and cook Brunswick stew, because the stirring of the pot, no matter what size, is constant to keep the stew from burning on the bottom and to prevent it from “clumping up.”

In Georgia, these stew crews call themselves “Stew Dogs.” Virginia has its “Stewmasters,” and the Brunswick Stewmasters Association welcomes newcomers to go through a one-year apprenticeship to learn proper cooking techniques and how to mix the ingredients.

John Drew Clary, who served as association president in 2010, notes “the stew should take a village to make, and feed just as many.”

When you’re cooking in an 85-gallon cast-iron stew pot with a wooden paddle, the “stew is done when the paddle can stand up in the middle,” Clary says.