A perpetual stew, also known as forever soup, hunter’s pot, or hunter’s stew, is a pot into which foodstuffs are placed and cooked, continuously. The pot is never or rarely emptied all the way, and ingredients and liquid are replenished as necessary. Such foods can continue cooking for decades or longer if properly maintained. The concept is often a common element in descriptions of medieval inns.

Foods prepared in a perpetual stew have been described as being flavorful due to the manner in which the ingredients blend together. Various ingredients can be used in a perpetual stew such as root vegetables, tubers (potatoes, yams, etc.), and various meats.

  • metaStatic
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    22 hours ago

    My favourite soup is the garbage disposal soup. Throw all your food scraps into the freezer and at the end of the week boil it in a soup/stock.

    This hunters malarkey would require you to add edible food and keep it cooking, which just sounds expensive on every level.

    • @satanmat
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      3 hours ago

      🎶 this is the soup that never ends

      It just goes on and on my friends ….

    • IninewCrow
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      86 hours ago

      Does this mean that they started the first batch thousands of years ago with Theseus in it?

        • IninewCrow
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          249 minutes ago

          There’s a bit of an aftertaste of tar from his ship tho

      • Chaotic Entropy
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        5 hours ago

        Them’s good eatin’. Add some broth, a potato… baby, you got a stew going.

      • snooggums
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        86 hours ago

        Don’t do it, that would get you banned from the internet!

          • @[email protected]
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            34 hours ago

            Why would someone downvote this person? I guess there’s people who are mean for no good reason everywhere…

            • @[email protected]
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              54 hours ago

              yep i made the mistake of conversing with the wrong person in a politics thread and now i’m watching them go through my profile and systematically downvote everything latest to earliest 😅 you would think we are all grown adults on here but many such cases

              • @[email protected]
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                24 hours ago

                How much recently did this happened? I feel like I’ve already seen you before saying this…

                Well, I guess that now you got a follower!

  • Flying Squid
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    125 hours ago

    Remember: you have to start it cooking by putting in a stone.

    • ElPussyKangaroo
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      12 hours ago

      This sounds vaguely like a joke from a book I read as a child…

    • Mike D.
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      43 hours ago

      Awesome.

      I was leaving the library over day with my son and looked at the cart of free books. Stone Soup was on that cart and damned sure I grabbed it.

      Gifted it to a friend on their child’s first birthday.

  • Akatsuki Levi
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    44 hours ago

    Perpetual stew of temporary blindness!

    • @Etterra
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      12 hours ago

      No no, that’s the perpetual mash of temporary blindness.

  • snooggums
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    176 hours ago

    Best way to avoid cleaning the pot!

  • IninewCrow
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    196 hours ago

    Just don’t scrape the pot too hard when stirring it.

    • @yggstyle
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      105 hours ago

      Look my iron deficiency isn’t going to fix itself…

    • @[email protected]
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      34 hours ago

      They usually use fire, so less a weaker flame no?, also, just scrape it everytime problem solved

    • Flying Squid
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      34 hours ago

      I solve this issue by making my perpetual stew in the crater of a tiny extinct volcano.

  • @wjrii
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    206 hours ago

    One minor cultural artifact of this general idea:

    Pease porridge hot, Pease porridge cold, Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old.

    • @AquaTofana
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      55 hours ago

      My husband and I had one going for a little over a week before the lockdowns as well. I just kinda lost interest in it.

      Kudos to your dedication!

  • @Nurse_Robot
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    137 hours ago

    I would unironically love it if a restaurant had this

    • @CascadianGiraffe
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      23 hours ago

      I’m pretty sure Than Brothers (Seattle famous Thai location) did this with their stock broth.

    • @yggstyle
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      55 hours ago

      A little soup store in Illinois called journeys end did something like this. (Long gone, a Walgreens got it)

      They’d have pots of soup that would kinda morph into the next one. It was pure comfort food and their sandwiches were dope. RIP.

      But it was popular. I think more places should do it.

    • Admiral PatrickOP
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      117 hours ago

      Right? It sounds delicious. Not sure how that would fly with modern health and safety rules, though. The Wikipedia entry says a New York restaurant did one for ~8 months, so it must be possible somehow.

      • @[email protected]
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        167 hours ago

        Needs to be kept above 70degC so heating could be costly. Other than that it’s safer than refridgeration as that only slows growth whereas keeping it hot prevents any growth at all.

        • @modeler
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          45 hours ago

          Better: Above 60°C pasteurizes the contents so killing all bacteria.

          Technically pasteurization is met by holding the food over a specific temperature for a specific time, so over 63-65°C for 30 minutes, or 100°C for 12 seconds.

          Normal pasteurization is very similar to cooking in times and temperature, and so pasteurization cooks both the food, altering texture, appearance and taste, and the bacteria.

          UHT means ultra high temperature pasteurisation, which heats, eg, milk well over 100°C for only a couple of seconds and immediately cools it, minimizing the alteration of the milk.

          So, by keeping the stew over 70°C, the stew is completely food safe.

        • Admiral PatrickOP
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          56 hours ago

          I saw that, and I also vaguely remember reading that in the past. So I guess it was less TIL and more “today I remembered” lol.

  • @JusticeForPorygon
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    55 hours ago

    So we’re germs like an issue with this? Or was it okay because it was always kept heated? I mean, obviously they theu didn’t know about germs in the middle ages, but they still woulda been there.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 hours ago

      As long as it is always kept hot then it shouldn’t be any problem at all. It can never be allowed to cool for very long though.

      • @JusticeForPorygon
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        21 hour ago

        Completely unrelated but I didn’t know underscores could also denote italics

    • @[email protected]
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      23 hours ago

      I sure the occasional person was unlucky and got a bowl that wasn’t cooked enough. There’s also a big difference between adding more to an 80% full pot vs a 20% full one for ingredient turnover.

  • @Today
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    37 hours ago

    My dad was a cowboy and they had this cooking in little cabins on the open range.