Fernandez’s Palayok: Philippine Food Time, On Site, in the Pot. San Isidro Labrador on May 15, celebrated in Lucban, Quezon by decorating the houses with food. In Madrid, Spain, the same feast is celebrated on the same day, and San Isidro Labrador is also the chicken and bean stew saint of Madrid.

This article is about the food. For NBA player nicknamed Beef Stew, see Isaiah Stewart. A stew is a combination of solid food ingredients that have been cooked in liquid and served in the resultant gravy. A stew needs to have raw ingredients added to the gravy. Stewing is suitable for the least tender cuts of meat that become tender and juicy with the slow moist heat method. This makes it popular in low-cost cooking.

Cuts having a certain amount of marbling and gelatinous connective tissue give moist, juicy stews, while lean meat may easily become dry. Stews are thickened by reduction or with flour, either by coating pieces of meat with flour before searing, or by using a roux or beurre manié, a dough consisting of equal parts of fat and flour. Stews are similar to soups, and in some cases there may not be a clear distinction between the two. Generally, stews have less liquid than soups, are much thicker and require longer cooking over low heat. While soups are almost always served in a bowl, stews may be thick enough to be served on a plate with the gravy as a sauce over the solid ingredients. Stews have been made since ancient times. The world’s oldest known evidence of stew was found in Japan, dating to the Jōmon period.

Amazonian tribes used the shells of turtles as vessels, boiling the entrails of the turtle and various other ingredients in them. There are recipes for lamb stews and fish stews in the Roman cookery book Apicius, believed to date from the 4th century AD. The Devil  dined on  a rebel or so in an Irish stew. Winterhilfe, the first Sunday of the month from October until March was declared Eintopfsonntag. Meat-based white stews also known as blanquettes or fricassées are made with lamb or veal that is blanched or lightly seared without browning, and cooked in stock. Handbook of Analysis of Edible Animal By-Products. Look up stew in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Geographic and personal tastes involve different types of meat and other ingredients. Recipes provoke disputes among aficionados, some of whom insist that the word chili applies only to the basic dish, without beans and tomatoes. In writings from 1529, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún described chili pepper-seasoned stews being consumed in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, now the location of Mexico City. Chili became commonly prepared in northern Mexico and southern Texas. The San Antonio Chili Stand, in operation at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, helped popularize chili by giving many Americans their first taste of it. San Antonio was a tourist destination and helped Texas-style chili con carne spread throughout the South and West.