Ten-Minute Perpetual Stew
by Elliot Alpern
3 A.M.
Oh hey there how’s it going, big hugs and greetings — my name’s Elliot and, on behalf of the crew, welcome to Midnight Oils! Tonight, that’s right, we’ll be trying our hands at our very own, ten-minute, perpetual stew. Now right off the bat here, I’m gonna tell you straight — this stew’ll take a few past ten minutes. It’s perpetual, which is to say… I don’t know what that’s to you. Forever. Forever minutes. But ten to get started.
Now what we’ll need to begin with here is your run of the mill cauldron, kettle, crock, stockpot, boiler, Dutch oven — dredge up an oil drum from the Gulf if you want, I don’t care. And once that’s all sleek and seasoned, we’ll need to get some heat under it. I’m not gonna give examples here; you know heat.
Just, low. And slow.
Base of oils first. I don’t know what the clever joke is with Midnight Oils and frankly I don’t see why I have to joke while I’m trying to start something everlasting, but any oil will do you fine. Butter’s nice, or seed oil, animal fats, rendered fats, oh here I go listing again. Any of the oils squeezed by humanity from something once plumper. Yeah, start with that. Melted down till it runs thin, and quick.
Throw in whatcha got before you see bubbles! Now goddamnit! Right goddamn now! Or you’ll find yourself a very momentary stew. If it’s gotta be rainwater and loose cabbage, apple juice and eggplant — you chuck it and stir. Mm-hm, smell that? That’s the start of something historied, baby. All you gotta do is bring your own forever-mélange to a low rolling boil.
If you’re having trouble with starters, that isn’t a bad thing — it means you’ve got options. Great! You’re not currently starving. Ergo, no need to boil down the tastiest nearby object for each molecule of sustenance.
No worries friend. Some tips from your local serfs!
Till earth in rows; plant seeds for eats some distant day. Forage in the meantime: questionable greens, bitter wild roots, mushrooms are the land’s Russian roulette. Maybe that’s your game, and that’s your business — but do know that some of those toadstools taste like kaleidoscopes, and smell like the universe. This can be useful for the advancement of the stew itself; these ingredients have been known to inspire further “creativity” in the cauldron. See: ergot. Better yet, leave rye in a dank cellar over-winter, gestate the fungus itself, then be: ergot. Advance spiritual understanding for serf-kind.
Give it a year, stirring frequently. Wild corns are mealy and their kernels sickly engorged, but they’ll soften given a couple weeks of stewin’. Likewise crabapples. Seeds and nuts, always. Now that’ll thicken you up and fill you down, but some’ll want their flesh. Bag a buck or a scrawny hare and butcher it yourself; I don’t have many tips for rippers.
Alrighty! So then, keep a careful watch on your kitchen timer — as the years drag on and the back curls groundward, you’ll want to keep adding what the land finally gives back. Fruits, gourds, tubers, ad infinitum, add another litany of whatever human ingenuity can wrench straight out of the dirt itself. Keep adding.
Flavor builds in the passage of time; that’s a culinary fact for you. Decades of stratified flavor. You won’t know delicious until it’s compounded into itself, continuously, for seasons. As grandparents fall ill, and are tended with warm soup, are buried; as children are born and then move to savory liquids, from their first mashes of fruit. Seasons, then years, decades, eras, until whoever tastes and adjusts this stew has never even met its parent. All the while, simmering in the corner, our perpetual family member.
Then, you will taste eternity in a spoonful.
For now, it’s a relatively simple recipe. Acquire ingredients, add them pell-mell. Heat low, slow. Find perpetual context: a traveler’s inn; a lodge for mountain journeyers; a community hearth; an ancestral home. Never stop adding.
Do NOT take the last bowl of perpetual stew, ever, not even when the fire’s gone out and all warmth lost.
A perpetual stew must never be finished.