She’s been cooking a stew for 40 days — and it’s attracted hundreds of new friends | CBC Radio

How do you find human connection in our modern times? One way, Annie Rauwerda recently discovered, is stew. 

Last month, she began simmering potato leek soup in a Crock-Pot. The vegan melange has now been consistently simmering for 40 days, transforming from a humble broth into a mighty perpetual stew.

Eventually, she started inviting people to come try and add to it with their own ingredients, which hundreds of people did. And the results have surprised her.

“In a big city, it’s easy to feel alone. It’s also very possible to create a community, even if it’s a community around weird things like a stew that doesn’t stop cooking,” Rauwerda told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. 

“I found the whole thing to be far more touching and far more human than I anticipated.”

Rauwerda, who lives in New York City, estimated about 300 people had contributed to its flavour as of Monday afternoon. 

Fans of strange information might know Rauwerda as the mastermind behind the popular Depths of Wikipedia social media accounts on Instagram, TikTok and more.

Rauwerda has been meticulously chronicling her stew’s journey online as well.

Her insightful and comical blog is home to a swirling medley of puns, including: stew world order, stew of Theseus, three stew-ges, stew york city, re-stew-rant and chugga chugga stew stew, to name a few. 

On Tiktok she’s posted clips of regular gatherings every Tuesday (or “stews-day”) with dozens of attendees dropping of ingredients like spices, vegetables or even a single, perfect bay leaf.

Rauwerda first got the idea during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she came across the Wikipedia page for perpetual stew. But lockdowns at the time made the community aspect impossible.

“However, as times have changed, I have not forgotten about the perpetual stew. And my best friend was in town for the summer,” she said.

“We like to do a lot of hijinx together. And so we had the idea. And then no one stopped us.”

Perpetual stew dates back to medieval times

The sense of community wafting off the stew makes sense in the eyes of Jeffrey Pilcher, a professor of history and food studies at the University of Toronto. 

“That notion of social connection around the pot, around the hearth, is fundamental to human societies,” he said.

He called the practice a “very basic, peasant way of cooking.” 

Pilcher could not say specifically which cultures may have been perpetually making stew throughout history.

Other historians have written about the practice’s existence in early Medieval times. 

In her book Food in History, British historian Reay Tannahill writes about how much of Medieval Europe north of the Alps would have daily meals that included an always-changing broth with new ingredients added daily. 

She writes that the cauldrons housing the broth were rarely emptied, allowing flavours to linger for weeks. 

“Except in really hard times, this system meant that there was generally something hot and filling to eat, even if it was no more than a soup thick with the shreds of past dinners,” Tannahill wrote. 

Is the stew actually good?

As for the flavours in Rauwerda’s stew, she said during a live taste-test on As it Happens, “It’s not bad. It just kind of tastes like broth.”

On her online stew log’s frequently asked questions page, one query asks: Is the stew actually good?

“Completely depends on the day,” reads the response.

As far as food safety goes, she’s being careful — keeping the stew above the temperature that could lead to bacteria growth. 

“The thing I’m a little bit more worried about is there might be a lot of people coming,” she said with a stew tasting planned for Tuesday night. 

“And so I just hope no one gets mad at me if we run out of stew.”