My first experience of Brunswick Stew came at a place that defied easy description – somewhere off the beaten path between Jackson and Milner, Georgia, far off any highway, and even further off the books. A place called Home Folks Corner. It was something between a juke joint and a restaurant, if it could even be called that. No sign out front, just the sound of laughter, the haze of woodsmoke, and the smell of pork fat in the air. Inside, long folding tables held plates piled high with barbecued pork, cornbread, and a steaming bowl of Brunswick Stew.
It was rich, red, and thick enough to coat the spoon. The stew was unfamiliar, but it felt like it had always been part of my story – something passed from ladle to bowl with a quiet kind of reverence. I didn’t know it then, but that bowl connected me to something bigger than just a meal. It was part of a Southern tradition of community, cooking, and care, where the stew pot was a centerpiece of gathering.
As I got older and traveled more, I discovered Brunswick Stew had cousins – burgoo in Kentucky and booyah in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Each stew has its own accent, its own spice, its own story. But they’re all branches of the same family tree: big-pot, long-simmering, crowd-feeding meals that nourish both body and spirit.
This is the story of three great American stews – born of necessity, raised on tradition, and still feeding communities today.
Brunswick Stew: A Southern Staple with Disputed Origins
Ask someone in Georgia and they’ll tell you Brunswick Stew was born in Brunswick, Georgia. Ask someone in Virginia, and you’ll get a different origin story. The truth is likely a little of both – and more.
The earliest versions date back to the 19th century and were made from whatever game was available, particularly squirrel or rabbit. Over time, the recipe evolved to use more accessible meats like chicken or pork. Today, it’s known for its rich tomato base and generous helpings of corn, lima beans, and shredded meat, simmered until it’s nearly the texture of barbecue.
Culturally, Brunswick Stew is deeply tied to church gatherings, civic clubs, and Southern hospitality. It’s a dish of abundance, made to share. And like many Southern foods, it has roots in both African American and Indigenous cooking traditions, as enslaved cooks and rural communities passed along techniques for stewing meats and preserving produce through slow cooking.
Burgoo: Kentucky’s Bold Contribution
Travel a few states north and the stew pot changes, but the spirit remains. In Kentucky, especially the western part of the state, the go-to community stew is burgoo – a name as quirky as the dish is robust. Legend has it that burgoo was served to Civil War troops and at horse-racing gatherings, cooked in cast-iron kettles big enough to paddle a canoe in.
(By the way, is it pronounced burg-oh or bur-goo? Them’s fighting words, mister.)
If Brunswick Stew is slow and sweet, burgoo is bold and spicy. Traditionally, it included a mix of meats – mutton, pork, venison, squirrel, or even raccoon – depending on what was available. Add in potatoes, corn, okra, tomatoes, lima beans, and a peppery kick, and you’ve got a meal designed to fill bellies and fire up taste buds.
But what really sets burgoo apart is what happens after the stew is cooked. Once all the ingredients have simmered for hours – sometimes a full day – they’re often run through a grinder, transforming the entire pot into a thick, uniform blend. The result is a stew where you can no longer identify the individual parts, but their flavors have deepened into something rich, cohesive, and entirely new.
There’s a kind of metaphor there. Burgoo doesn’t just bring ingredients together – it blends them until they’re indistinguishable, like voices in a choir or hands in a barn-raising. It’s a stew about unity, about shared contribution, about feeding many from a single pot.
Burgoo has become a fixture at political rallies, church picnics, and Derby Week events, with each region putting its own spin on the recipe. Some say the true Kentucky way is to make it so thick that a spoon can stand straight up in the pot. Others insist it should be just loose enough to sip from a cup. Either way, it’s a food that invites debate, storytelling, and seconds.
Like Brunswick Stew, burgoo has a deep connection to working-class life – a food born of scarcity and transformed by community. It reflects Kentucky’s rural roots, the mingling of frontier ingenuity with Appalachian resilience, and the kind of warmth that lingers long after the last bowl is scraped clean.
Booyah: Belgian Heritage in a Big Pot
Travel north to Wisconsin and Minnesota, and you’ll find booyah – a word as fun to say as the dish is to eat. Booyah!!! Its roots trace to Belgian American immigrants who settled in the Great Lakes region, particularly around Green Bay, Wisconsin. These communities brought with them a tradition of slow-cooked stews, which evolved into what is now booyah.
Booyah is typically cooked outdoors in enormous kettles – think 50 gallons or more – and often takes two days to prepare. It’s a mix of chicken, beef, pork, and a garden’s worth of vegetables: cabbage, carrots, celery, peas, onions, and potatoes.
It’s served at fall festivals, Catholic church picnics, and fire department fundraisers. Booyah is so beloved in some areas that there are contests, bumper stickers, and even “Booyah Bash” events dedicated to it.
Unlike its Southern cousins, booyah’s cultural history is explicitly tied to Belgian Catholic immigrant communities, many of whom settled in tight-knit rural parishes where cooking a giant stew was both practical and deeply symbolic of shared life.
Distant Cousins from Other Kitchens
Brunswick Stew, Burgoo, and Booyah aren’t alone in this wide American family of big-pot cooking. All across the country, other stews have been quietly bringing people together – different in name and flavor, but sharing the same DNA of hospitality, resourcefulness, and community spirit.
These dishes may not all go by the name “stew,” but they follow the same formula: simple ingredients, slow cooking, and the kind of meals that feed both body and soul.
Take Mulligan Stew, for example. This Depression-era staple was built around generosity – everyone contributed what they had, and the pot became a meal. Often associated with hobo camps and Irish-American communities in the Midwest, it was proof that even when money was tight, food could still be shared.
Then there’s Son-of-a-Gun Stew, born on cattle drives out West. It used every edible part of a freshly butchered cow – heart, liver, marrow bones – and fed a hungry cowboy crew around the campfire. It was gritty, practical, and deeply nourishing, a stew of necessity and grit.
Back in the South again, gumbo and jambalaya reign as icons of Creole and Cajun cooking, blending African, French, and Spanish influences in ways that tell a story with every spoonful. These stews were shaped by colonial history, but their staying power comes from how they continue to bring families and parishes together.
Travel north, and you’ll find clam chowder and clam bakes in New England, where big pots of shellfish and corn are steamed over seaweed and served by the shoreline. Or head southwest, and a bowl of caldo de res, the Mexican beef and vegetable stew, might be waiting in a grandmother’s kitchen or at a Sunday family gathering.
And in the Carolina Lowcountry, Hoppin’ John Stew, made from black-eyed peas and rice, carries the legacy of Gullah Geechee cooking and African ancestral traditions. It’s still cooked for New Year’s Day in many homes, offering not just sustenance but the hope of luck and prosperity.
These “distant cousins” remind us that the impulse to gather around a bubbling pot of something warm and sustaining is universal. No matter where you’re from, the stew pot seems to say the same thing: there’s enough for everyone if we all bring something to the table.
Three Stews (and more), One Spirit
Three stews. Three regions. Three cultures simmered slowly over time.
Brunswick Stew, with its tomato tang and tender shreds of meat, carries the warmth of the South – born in smokehouses and stewed in stories. Burgoo, bold and blended, speaks to Kentucky’s spirit of resilience and reinvention, where many parts become one hearty whole. And Booyah, with its massive kettles and long, slow cook, keeps alive the heritage of Belgian immigrants who brought their traditions to the upper Midwest and found new ways to nourish both body and community.
Each of these stews reflects something essential about the places they come from. They tell us who gathered at the table, what was in the garden or the smokehouse, and how communities cared for one another in times of scarcity or celebration. They are recipes written by history, flavored with faith, friendship, and a deep sense of place.
And while their ingredients differ – game meat or pork shoulder, okra or cabbage, corn or carrots – the spirit behind them is the same. These are communal foods, cooked not for one or two, but for fifty or five hundred. They are meant to be stirred with patience and shared with joy. They invite participation – someone hauls the wood, someone stokes the fire, someone brings cornbread, and someone tells a joke that gets passed around with the ladle.
In a world that sometimes feels increasingly fragmented, these stews are a reminder of what it means to gather, to contribute, and to feed each other well. They’re not just about what’s in the pot. They’re about who’s around it.
So whether you’re in a churchyard in Georgia, a fairground in Kentucky, or a firehouse in Wisconsin, when the stew is served, you’re not just getting a meal. You’re getting a piece of American folk tradition – slow-cooked and deeply shared.
And if you’re lucky, maybe a second helping.
