Helping with Brunswick Stew

Jimmy and Regina's church usually makes Brunswick Stew in conjunction with their Fall Festival each year. The Fall Festival was cancelled last year and this year, as was the making of the stew in 2020, but, the men's group decided to go ahead with making Brunswick Stew this year, so we got to be part of it.

The process starts ahead of time with acquiring the ingredients for the stew... they make 500+ quarts of stew, so it takes a LOT of each ingredient! (no pictures from this component)

One of the to-do's is to get the cooking pots -- a hunt club has the cooking pots, so Jimmy took Carl and another fellow from church to load up the pots and stoves -- picture is of the stoves on the trailer...

Cooking pots on the trailer -- each pot is REALLY heavy -- 2 50 gallon steel and one 35 gallon cast iron pot.

On Thursday, the day before the "prep" day at church, we started "prepping" by cleaning the outside table and the cooking pots...

Even though the previous users of the pots had put oil on the inside when they were stored, the pots had rusted some, so we cleaned them enough to get at least some of the rust off and to clean the old oil out...

Carl cleaning the iron pot (we did not scour it as the pot is seasoned and we didn't want to remove that).

At the point when I took this picture, one of the steel pots was done and covered with plastic, the second steel pot was almost complete and ready to be covered, and Carl was cleaning the iron pot.

Friday was the prep day at church...

Jimmy was manning the cooking of the chicken outside -- 400 pounds of chicken legs and thighs!

Jimmy would check the temperature of the meat before pulling it out of the pot to make sure it was fully cooked.

Meanwhile inside, quite a number of the church folks got started on peeling the potatoes ...

lots and lots of potatoes...

Did I mention that there were a lot of potatoes to peel? The peelers also sliced the potatoes into quarters...

so the folks in the kitchen could use an electric slicer to slice them into the size appropriate for cooking in the stew.

At the same time, others were chopping onions!

Carl was outside helping with cooking chicken (it was chilly!).

Inside, we continued with chopping green peppers and celery...

Washing pans...

Many hands helped with picking the chicken off the bones after it was cooked and cooled.

Once the chicken cooking was completed, Carl and Jimmy moved on to setting up the cooking stoves for the kettles so they would be ready in the morning.

Making sure the stove pipe would stay up during the cooking.

Saturday morning started before sunrise with getting the wood cook fires for the stoves going.

Nephew Ricky preparing wood for the fire.

Cooking pots are on the stoves -- water is being added to start the process -- as the pots heated, the potatoes could be added.

Once ingredients started being added to the pots, each needed continual stirring.

All of the ingredients are prepped and ready to go in -- the recipe (which Jimmy is reading) tells precisely when each ingredient should be added.

There were a number of men helping during the cooking on Saturday.

Carl got his turn stirring.

What the pot looked like when he was stirring.

Nephew Ricky adding some ingredients -- the pot is getting more full!

Once all the ingredients are in, the pots are plumb full!

The stirring becomes more challenging as the stew becomes thicker.

Keep that stew moving!

The guys who are not currently stirring stay around to help out as needed!

The last 45 minutes or so, the stew had gotten so thick that the paddles could stand up in it on their own!

Jimmy shared with the guys who were cooking that the paddles had been made by Dwayne 3 years ago (http://trekincartwrights.blogspot.com/2018/10/brunswick-stew.html)...

Once the stew was "done", it was time to serve it out into quart containers...

Then the quart containers were carried into the fellowship hall...

Filling and cleaning the outside of the quart containers (Pastor Bill on the left)...

Fill the containers, put the tops on...

Once they are carried inside, the quarts are put onto long tables, ready to be sold and picked up.

Cooking all done, the stoves are dismantled...

... and the cooking pots are cleaned!

Ricky and a couple of other men from the church took the pots and stoves back to the hunt club on Saturday afternoon.

The results of all of the labor, 500+ quarts of Brunswick Stew!

Many quarts were pre-ordered, others were sold on Saturday, only about 50 remained on Sunday morning, and they were probably all sold by time church was done.

In case you don't know about Brunswick Stew, here are a couple of articles that might help:

https://www.southernthing.com/brunswick-stew-origin-2618902475.html?rebelltitem=6#rebelltitem6

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_stew