Simmering question: Is it soup or stew?

By The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

There's a German proverb that loosely translates as "five were invited, 10 showed up - add water to the soup and all are welcome." And there's surely no better time to eat soup than in the dark, dreary days of January, writes Kelly Brant in Wednesday's Food section.

Sitting down with a bowl of hearty soup and hunk of crusty bread can make winter's gray tones feel not quite so blue. But is that soup really soup? Or is it stew?

According to "Food Lovers' Companion" by Sharon Tyler Herbst, a soup is any combination of vegetables, meat or fish cooked in a liquid, while a stew is "any dish that is prepared by stewing ... most often applied to dishes that contain meat, vegetables and a thick soup-like broth."

Those definitions may sound confusingly similar. To put it simply, for a soup to be a stew, the meat (or fish or vegetables) has to be stewed, as in simmered slowly in a shallow liquid in a pot with a tight lid. This cooking method, where the meat is barely covered with liquid and cooked for a long period of time, produces more tender and flavorful meat.

Read tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.

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