The First Stew of the Season

The first stew of the season is not a recipe. It is a ritual. It happens on the first Friday I drive up after the night air has gone honest - which, this year, was the second weekend of October. The Subaru gets unloaded, the windows are opened to let the cabin air change, the woodstove is started even though it isn't quite cold enough yet, and a Dutch oven goes on the back of the range with a slow fire under it.

What goes in is whatever I have. That is the whole thing. The first stew is meant to be assembled from the bottom drawer of the city refrigerator and whatever survived the drive in the cooler. This year it was a chuck roast that had gotten three days too old, four carrots, two yellow onions, a head of garlic past its best, the last of a bottle of red, half a quart of stock, and a handful of dried mushrooms I keep in a Mason jar specifically for this purpose. The dried mushrooms are the trick. They lift any first stew.

I sear the meat in the Dutch oven, two batches, hot and patient. I take the meat out and brown the onions in the same fat. I put the meat back, pour in the wine and the stock, drop in the carrots and the garlic and a few sprigs of whatever woody herb is on the back deck still alive, lid it, and slide it to the back of the range where the heat is softest. Then I do not touch it for three hours.

What that three hours is for is everything else. It is for the unloading, the bed-making, the sweeping out of the corners, the small inventory of which lightbulbs need replacing and what flew into a corner of the porch in October. By the time the stew is done I have made the cabin recognize me again, and the cabin has made me slow back down.

We eat it on the kitchen table with a piece of bread and a salad of whatever the Saturday market had two weeks ago. There is always too much. The leftover is dinner Sunday. There is no dish, in any cuisine I cook, that is better the night it is made than the second night.

The first stew has been the same on this stove for twenty-one years. The cabin and I will keep doing it as long as one of us is still here.