Stews have been made since ancient times. The world's oldest known evidence of stew was found in Japan, dating to the Jōmon period.
They made seafood stews, whose ingredients varied with the seasons. The food was cooked in large conical or rounded pots with tapered or pointy bottoms that sat well in the soil and ash of the bonfire or hearth.1
Amazonian tribes used the shells of turtles as vessels, boiling the entrails of the turtle and various other ingredients in them.
There are recipes for pork stews and fish stews in the Roman cookery book Apicius, believed to date from the 4th century AD. Le Viandier, one of the oldest cookbooks in French, written in the early 14th century by the French chef known as Taillevent, has ragouts or stews of various types in it.2
The first written reference to 'Irish stew' is in Byron's "The Devil's Drive" (1814): "The Devil ... dined on ... a rebel or so in an Irish stew."3
There are a large variety of stews, ranging from those including meat or seafood, to those that are vegetarian or vegan. Meat-based white stews also known as blanquettes or fricassées are made with lamb or veal that is blanched or lightly seared without browning, and cooked in stock. Brown stews are made with pieces of red meat that are first seared or browned, before a browned mirepoix and sometimes browned flour, stock and wine are added.
Main article: List of stews
BBC - A History of the World - About: Transcripts - Episode 10 - Jomon pot https://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/about/transcripts/episode10/ ↩
"Taillevent, Viandier (Manuscrit du Vatican)". www.staff.uni-giessen.de. Archived from the original on 2020-08-07. Retrieved 2017-01-27. https://web.archive.org/web/20200807145414/https://www.staff.uni-giessen.de/gloning/tx/vi-vat.htm ↩
Byron, George Gordon Byron Baron (1891-01-01). The Poetical Works of Lord Byron: With Memoir and the Original Explanatory Notes, &c. F. Warne and Company. https://books.google.com/books?id=Ax03AAAAIAAJ&q=irish+stew&pg=PA58 ↩
Koshi Ishtu – Kerala Chicken Stew Recipe – Food.com – 265726 https://archive.today/20120911044435/http://www.recipezaar.com/Koshi-Ishtu-Kerala-Chicken-Stew-265726 ↩
Leo M.L. Nollet; Fidel Toldra (1 April 2011). Handbook of Analysis of Edible Animal By-Products. CRC Press. pp. 9–. ISBN 978-1-4398-0361-5. 978-1-4398-0361-5 ↩