An editorial ledger of High Country stews & cast-iron cookery
From the Brunswick-stew pits of the 1820s Virginia line to the chicken-and-pastry tables of Boone to the cast-iron Dutch ovens of Valle Crucis — the slow, long-simmered cookery of the southern Blue Ridge.
A stew that started as a squirrel-hunt cookout and ended as a county-fair staple.
Brunswick stew is the stew of the southern Appalachians — invented, by disputed tradition, in either Brunswick County, Virginia, or Brunswick, Georgia, sometime in the 1820s. The original was a squirrel stew, with corn, butterbeans, and tomatoes, cooked in iron kettles over a hardwood fire. The High Country version has mostly shifted to chicken-and-pork, but the bones of the recipe are unchanged.
The stew is a community dish. No one makes a single pot. The smallest practical batch is six gallons — enough to feed twenty at a working dinner, fifty at a potluck, two hundred at a county fair. The cook stirs every fifteen minutes for six hours, scraping the bottom where the sugars from the corn and tomato threaten to scorch. A stew that scorches is a stew that has to start over.
Three chickens (stewed, deboned, meat reserved). Two pounds of pork shoulder (cubed, browned). Two pounds of frozen lima beans. Two #10 cans of crushed tomatoes. Two pounds of corn (cut fresh if August, frozen otherwise). One quart of chicken stock. One cup of Worcestershire. Salt, black pepper, and a single pod of dried red pepper. The recipe is forgiving; the stirring is not.
A Kentucky original adopted by the High Country — meat, beans, greens, and tomato, stirred for hours.
Burgoo is the Kentucky cousin of Brunswick stew — a thicker, meatier, longer-cooked dish made traditionally with whatever protein the cook could find: squirrel, venison, opossum, beef, mutton, chicken, all at once. The High Country burgoo keeps the mutton when it can find it; otherwise a beef-and-chicken base is the rule.
The defining technique is the long stir. Burgoo is cooked in a 30-gallon cast-iron washpot over a hardwood fire, stirred every ten to fifteen minutes for six to ten hours. The stirring is what homogenizes the meat, beans, and greens into a single thick stew where you can no longer pick out individual ingredients — the burgoo is finished when it looks like a thick, dark porridge.
| Component | Source | Quantity per 30 gal | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beef shank | Local butcher | 8 lb | Bone-in, for body and collagen |
| Mutton or lamb | Watauga farm | 4 lb | The traditional burgoo flavor |
| Whole chicken | Local grower | 6 birds | Stewed, deboned, meat reserved |
| Pinto beans | Soaked overnight | 3 lb dry | The burgoo thickener |
| Cabbage & greens | Local field | 4 lb | Added in the last two hours |
| Crushed tomatoes | #10 cans | 3 cans | For sweetness and acidity |
| Corn | Cut fresh | 2 lb | The High Country twist |
Burgoo is a festival stew. The High Country versions appear at the West Jefferson Bean Festival in October, the Valle Crucis Hog Day in November, and the Boone Fiddlers' Convention in July. A working burgoo cook is a regional figure — Bob T. of Deep Gap ran the Valle Crucis pot for twenty-two years before handing the paddle to his daughter.
The High Country's working dish — stewed chicken under flat noodles or biscuit dough.
Chicken and pastry is what a High Country cook calls Sunday dinner. It is not a chicken pot-pie with a closed top crust — it is a bowl of stewed chicken and rich broth, served with broad flat noodles (called pastry in the local kitchen) or with broken buttermilk biscuits dropped on top.
The broth is the dish. A stewing hen — never a fryer — simmered for four hours with onion, celery, salt pork, and a handful of dried sage produces a stock that gels when cold. The pastry is rolled thin, dried on a cloth for thirty minutes, then dropped into the hot broth to thicken it.
Two cups of flour, one egg, a quarter cup of lard, and enough ice water to bring it together. The dough rests an hour, then is rolled to a quarter-inch thickness on a floured board and draped over a wooden pole to dry. Once dry it is broken into two-inch pieces and added to the hot broth ten minutes before serving.
The High Country has always cooked in cast iron. The cookware outlives the cook.
The cast-iron Dutch oven is the central tool of southern Appalachian cookery — a heavy three-legged pot with a flanged lid that holds coals on top, allowing the food to cook from above and below at the same time. A working cast-iron collection in a High Country kitchen includes at least three sizes: a 12" family pot, a 10" side pot, and a 6" single-servings piece.
Cast-iron is seasoned, not cleaned. A new Dutch oven is rubbed inside with lard and baked at 350°F for an hour, twice, before its first use. The polymerized fat becomes the cooking surface and the protection against rust. A well-seasoned oven is black, glossy, and slick — the sign of a kitchen that has been in use for thirty years.
| Size | Capacity | Use | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 inch | 2 qt | Single-serving stews, sides | Two coals on the lid |
| 8 inch | 3.5 qt | Side dishes, biscuits | Eight coals top, ten bottom |
| 10 inch | 5 qt | Sunday chicken & pastry | Twelve coals top, fourteen bottom |
| 12 inch | 7 qt | Family Brunswick, burgoo | Sixteen coals top, eighteen bottom |
| 14 inch | 10 qt | Festival-scale pot | Used at the bean festival |
The High Country Dutch oven is almost always a Lodge or a vintage Griswold — the latter prized by collectors, the former standard in working kitchens. A new 12" Lodge runs about $70 and weighs 24 pounds; a vintage Griswold of the same size runs $250–$600 if you can find one without cracks.
The weeknight version of the long Sunday cook — beef shank, root vegetables, and the cast-iron pot.
Not every High Country stew is a community dish. The weeknight beef stew is a private cookery — chuck or shank browned in a 10" Dutch oven, onion and garlic sweated in the fat, stock and red wine added, root vegetables dropped in the last hour, a final rest off the heat for the collagen to settle.
The key is the cut. Chuck is forgiving — it falls apart after two hours and yields a tender bowl without much fuss. Shank is the better cut — more collagen, more flavor, but it asks for three hours minimum. Round is the cut the cookbooks recommend but the High Country cook avoids; it dries out before the broth develops.
Three pounds of beef, browned. One large onion, diced. Four cloves of garlic. Two carrots. Two turnips. Three medium potatoes. Two cups of beef stock. One cup of dry red wine (the High Country cook uses local cabernet franc when it's in the glass). Two tablespoons of tomato paste. A bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, a strip of lemon peel. Salt at the end, not the beginning — early salting tightens the meat.
The Wednesday-night potluck tradition — Brunswick, burgoo, beef, chicken-and-pastry, all on the same table.
The High Country church-supper calendar runs from September through May. Every Wednesday night a different congregation hosts; the tables hold twenty to forty covered dishes, and at least a third of them are stews. The stew is the offering that scales — one cook feeds thirty with a single 14" Dutch oven, and the leftovers travel home in Mason jars.
The unspoken rule of the church-supper stew is that no cook brings the same dish twice in a season. Brunswick in October, burgoo in November, beef in December, chicken-and-pastry in January, white-bean-and-ham in February, the same Brunswick again at the Easter revival. The stews rotate; the cooks come back every week.
The pot-pie tradition the High Country kept from the Pennsylvania Dutch settlers of the 1810s.
The closed-top pot-pie arrived in the High Country with the Pennsylvania Dutch migration of the early 1800s, when families from Lancaster County settled the northern tier of Ashe and Alleghany counties. The dish is a closed biscuit crust over a savory filling — usually chicken, sometimes beef — baked in a deep dish until the crust is brown and the filling is bubbling through the slits cut in the top.
The High Country pot-pie is distinguished from a Yankee potpie by the biscuit crust, which is dropped from a soft dough onto the bubbling filling in spoonfuls rather than rolled and laid on top. The biscuit-dumplings swell as they steam and break the surface in places, leaving an irregular crust that is the sign of a proper pot-pie.
The High Country cook serves the pot-pie in the baking dish — the crust is too delicate to plate. A wooden spoon, a wide bowl, and a jar of pickled beets on the side is the standard supper.
Where to learn more about High Country stew cookery.
The High Country stew tradition is oral, not literary — most of the working recipes live in church and family cookbooks, on index cards in kitchen drawers, and in the heads of the women who stir the Brunswick pits each October. The printed record is thin but worth knowing.
The Valle Crucis Conference Center hosts a Dutch-oven cook-off every third Saturday in June — a chance to see the regional cooks in action and to taste every stew in this ledger in a single afternoon.