What’s for dinner? Try a bowl of Dinty Moore Beef Stew

When adult leaders of Boy Scout Troop 13 wanted a good meal at the campsite, they ensured that the patrol boxes were well stocked with Dinty Moore Beef Stew.

 

For supper, even the greenest of Tenderfoot Scouts could prepare a batch by just popping open a can or two of Dinty Moore and inserting the contents into a big pot.

As the mixture of beef, potatoes and carrots began to simmer on the propane-fired cook stoves, all that was required was proper stirring as the juices began to steam and bubble.

Freelance journalist Josh Wussow of Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., said “there’s nothing quite like the cozy aroma and flavor of Hormel’s classic Dinty Moore Beef Stew. Accept no substitutes. Be wary; there are no peas in ‘the real’ Dinty Moore.”

 

“I have a passion for lifelong learning,” Wussow wrote, “so, when I recently picked up a can at the store, I got to wondering: Who is Dinty Moore, anyway?”

The origin of the product is a winding road that began in 1913 with a popular comic strip called “Bringing Up Father,” created by George McManus, a cartoonist who worked for William Randolph Hearst’s New York American newspaper in New York City.

McManus named the comic strip’s neighborhood tavern as the Dinty Moore, a tribute to his friend James Moore, who owned a popular Irish eatery in midtown Manhattan that the artist patronized regularly.

 

Somehow, rights to the Dinty Moore name were obtained and registered in the early 1930s by C.F. Witt & Sons, a large grocery retailer in Minneapolis, Minn. The Witts began to sell and distribute canned, cured meat products under the Dinty Moore trademark.

 

In 1935, Hormel Foods of Austin, Minn., acquired the Dinty Moore brand name from the Witt family. That same year, Jay Catherwood Hormel (shown below) formulated the recipe for Dinty Moore Beef Stew. (He was the son of George A. Hormel, who founded the company in 1891.)

 

For 90 years now, the Dinty Moore Beef Stew recipe has remained pretty much the same, said Sarah Johnson, a Hormel marketing executive who formerly served as Dinty Moore brand manager.

 

In the 1960s, a fictional, cartoonish, lantern-jawed, muscle-bound Paul Bunyanesque woodsman was introduced as the brand mascot. He placed his signature thumbprint on every can.

 

More recently, advertising focused on real lumberjacks wielding axes in the forest. They were joined in the tree felling activities by a crew of eager beavers. Together, they all chowed down on Dinty Moore Beef Stew after a hard day’s work.

Part of the strategy, Johnson said, “is to be where consumers need us to be and conform to busy lifestyles.” As a result, Dinty Moore has expanded to offer single-serve options and microwaveable varieties.

 

As a testimonial to Dinty Moore Beef Stew, the cast of the television series “Little House on the Prairie” frequently ate bowls of Dinty Moore around the dinner table at the Ingalls cabin between 1974 and 1982, while the show aired on the NBC network.

 

Philip Potempa of the Chicago Tribune reported that actress Melissa Gilbert, who played Laura Ingalls, said that during the family meal scenes, the food provided by the prop department was “real but not homemade.”

“What we were actually eating was canned Dinty Moore Beef Stew, Pillsbury biscuits, pies from a local store and Kentucky Fried Chicken,” Gilbert said.

Melissa would frequently sneak back for seconds when the camera wasn’t rolling, Potempa said.

Why not step outside the can? Pour your heated Dinty Moore Beef Stew over a bed of freshly prepared egg noodles.

 

 

 

“Bringing Up Father” featured Irishman Jiggs and his wife, Maggie. Jiggs had been a common laborer until he won the $1 million jackpot in the Irish Sweepstakes. 

While his comfort zone remained “socializing at the local tavern with his old gang of boisterous, rough-edged pals and eating corned beef and cabbage,” that didn’t suit Maggie. 

She and their daughter, Nora, saw the windfall as a ticket to upward mobility among the “nouveau riche.” The “Bringing Up Father” comic strip, distributed broadly by King Features Syndicate, ran for 87 years from 1913-2000.

 

Artist George McManus served during World War I as a member of the U.S. Army Air Service’s 11th Bomb Squadron, which was organized at Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas. The squadron deployed to France and fought on the Western Front. McManus designed the emblem adopted by the unit – Jiggs at war.

This version appeared during World War II, when the 11th Bomb Squadron served in the Pacific Theater, guarding against the Japanese advance through the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, one of the overseas territories of the Netherlands (now Indonesia). 

Today, the 11th Bomb Squadron is a unit of the U.S. Air Force, 2nd Operations Group, 2nd Bomb Wing, located at Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, La. It has maintained Jiggs as its insignia.

 

In 1995, George McManus’ comic strip “Bringing Up Father” was one of 20 included in the “Comic Strip Classics” series of commemorative U.S. first class postage stamps.