A Sutherland Belle
“Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.”

My Mama’s Vegetable Beef Stew

Beef Vegetable Stew

In the South, cookbooks are like practical, instructive poetry, with ingredients reading out beautifully in tandem—buttermilk, bacon grease, green tomatoes, and so on. Despite many Southern home cooks simply knowing their family recipes by heart, there's also a deep affection for local community cookbooks. These tattered, passed-down volumes are basically overflowing recipe boxes containing all the secrets of Southern cooking, and the pages are often the place where grandmothers learned and tweaked their own creations, scribbling notes amongst saucy splatters. And one thing is certain: There is no community cookbook more iconic or beloved than your local church.

Cookbooks can be a way to experiment with food, and try new things, and new flavors. But for American women, community cookbooks—multi-authored, communally compiled publications—have served a bigger purpose. They have been a way to create community, find a voice, and carve out a space that celebrates women getting together, creating collectively, feeding and nurturing others, and valuing women and women’s work.

Community-created cookbooks were generally locally printed publications, and though many were put together by religious groups of women, they weren’t a means of proselytizing. Instead, they were used as fundraisers for either religious institutions or charities, and they have been a part of American culture since the beginning of the printing press.

For all of these groups of women, cookbooks created a community. A community of writers, of cooks, of historians. They bound these women through religion, politics, race, and class. All this they did in a world that men seemed to have little interest in participating in, or even understanding. While times have changed and today cookbooks are filled with glossy perfect photos, it's those small cookbooks that hold all the real love of cooking from women who came before me. From Grandmother’s Old Fashioned Boston Brown Bread to Aunt Hilda’s Toffee Squares, the under-appreciated world of community cookbooks is big on practical recipes and warm hits of nostalgia. Those are the cookbooks that contain all the flavors of my childhood.

My Mama's Vegetable Beef Stew

INGREDIENTS

  • 2 cups water
  • 1 cup chicken stock
  • 3 lb. bone-in beef short ribs, cut into 1- to 2-inch pieces
  • 3 dried bay leaf
  • 1 (28-ounce) can of diced tomatoes
  • 1 (28-ounce) can of tomato sauce
  • 1 (6 ounces) can tomato paste
  • 6 carrots, chopped (3 cups)
  • 3 peeled chopped russet potatoes
  • 2 cups frozen corn
  • 1 chopped yellow onion
  • 1 (14.5 ounces) can of lima beans
  • 1 1/2 Tablespoons kosher salt
  • 2 Tablespoons Creole seasoning (optional but highly recommended)
  • 1 Tablespoon black pepper
  • Garnish with saltine crackers and fresh parsley

INSTRUCTIONS

  1. Fill a large soup pot with cold water and chicken stock; add short ribs and bay leaves. Bring to a simmer over low; simmer, undisturbed, for 1 hour, 30 minutes.
  2. Add carrots, tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, potato, corn, onion, and lima beans to ribs in a soup pot. Simmer over low, stirring occasionally, for 1 hour.
  3. Remove from heat; add salt, Creole seasoning (if desired), and pepper, stirring until well combined.
  4. Remove and discard bay leaves and bones from short ribs. Top with fresh parsley and serve with saltine crackers.

You may also enjoy:

Share: