Southern Stews: A Taste of the South

      Produced with grants from the Southern Humanities Media Fund and the South Carolina Humanites Council in partnership with the McKissick Museum Folklife Resource Center (University of South Carolina, Columbia), this documentary was created as a companion to the Southern Stews millenial exhibition presented at McKissick Museum in 2000. The exhibition presented objects from the material culture of stewmaking in the South. It drew upon footage shot by Stan Woodward on his many treks throughout the South when making the Virginia Brunswick stew documentary, where the filmmaker came across stewmaking activities of various kinds in the black iron washpots. This rare footage in The Woodward Studio folklife video archive was used to combine with fresh footage gathered for the documentary to make Southern Stews: A Taste of the South.

Utilizing a team of humanities scholars and folklorists, Stan Woodward and Jay Williams made treks through Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Using his spontaneous first-person hand-held camera style, Stan takes the viewer on a journey into the stew culture and communities rarely seen but widely occuring throughout the South. We start out and end up in the Western Kentucky community of Sorgho, in the Owensboro region. Here a mutton-based stew called burgoo is the traditional stew of the region. It is the centerpiece for a series of huge barbecues that occur in the Owensboro area from May through September.  The annual 4th of July barbecue at St. Mary Magdalene Catholic church draws thousands of people - many returning home from distant states. This is where food writer, John Egerton starts us off and pitches us to the shores of the James River in Virginia and to James Fort near Jamestown. Here we learn that "Burgoo" was the name of a seafaring porridge in the annals of 17th century cookmasters onboard the sailing vessels that came to the New World. These Europeans brought black cast iron wash pots doubling as cook pots as the most precious of the ship's inventory of survival-ware.

Food historian, Dennis Cotner of Colonial Williamsburg tells us that the black washpot was the essential cooking vessel as settlers moved west into the mountains. We follow this trail and discovery a "Burgoo" folk heritage foodways festival in West Virginia that is based on a legendary story of cooking burgoo along the Elk River by a hunting party which came in from the West in the mid-1800's. From there we follow traditions of Brunswick stew in the South  from Virginia to Georgia, discovering along the way that in South Carolina the stew that pre-dated Brunswick stew was called "hash". South Carolina's early history and settlement produced two other indigenous stews called "Frogmore Stew" and "Chicken Bog" - both with origins dating back to slaves concocting these high-protein meals over rice.  

As we enter Georgia and move into South Carolina, folklorists John Burrison (Georgia State University), Saddler Taylor (University of South Carolina) and cultural geographer Richard Pillsbury (Georgia State University, retired) contextualize and comment on these stewmaking traditions, providing interpretative insights into how and why these stews play such an important role in Southern vernacular culture. Before we return to Sorgho at the end of the film we discover the most unusual - and most intensely localized - stew in the South. In the tiny town of Dundas, Virginia we learn about a sheep stew tradition that is little known outside a twenty mile radius of Dundas. Yet three times a year hundreds of people come to Dundas, doubling the population of the town as they carry away gallon containers of what the Dundas Ruritan club claims to be a "gastronomical delight."

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