The regional table / Georgia
Brunswick Stew
Two towns named Brunswick have spent well over a century claiming this pot, and the only way to write it honestly is to cook what both of them printed.
The fight is real, it is old, and it is in the newspapers. Through June and July of 1906 the Americus Times-Recorder, a Georgia paper, ran and reran a column headed "Brunswick Stew. A Gastronomic Triumph With a National Reputation," credited at the foot to the Richmond Times. It opens flatly: the stew "originated in Brunswick county, Va., from which it takes its name," and the originator "was either Mr. Haskins or Mr. Stith, each claiming during a long life the distinction of having made the first stew and dying without a proper adjustment of the controversy." Georgia papers kept printing the Virginia line for another half century — the Brantley Enterprise of Nahunta, in southeast Georgia, told its readers on 26 May 1955 that the stew "had its origin up in Brunswick County, Virginia" — and a Blakely grocer advertised canned Brunswick stew in the Early County News of 15 March 1928 as "the stew that made Old Virginia famous."
Georgia answers with the legislature and with volume. The Summerville News of 19 May 1988 printed House Resolution 906 in full: the "Battle of the Brunswicks" has "stewed in every cauldron of controversy," and the City of Brunswick "possesses the very pot in which the first batch of Brunswick Stew was cooked on July 2, 1898," a pot the resolution says came to Georgia aboard the ship Wanderer and which the city fathers set up as a monument in 1942. The House passed it unanimously. In 2025 the state went further: as the Jackson Herald reported on 3 December 2025, House Bill 233 made Brunswick stew the official state stew, the bill stating that "contrary to claims by other states, Georgia, and specifically Brunswick, Georgia, is the birthplace of Brunswick stew." I am not adjudicating that. What this page works from is what both sides printed: the 1906 Richmond Times recipe, a layered kettle version from the Griffin Daily News of 22 December 1924, and the Georgia barbecue record, where the Leader-Tribune of Fort Valley counted four thousand gallons of stew served at the 1924 peach festival barbecue and the Fitzgerald paper, writing up the same day, printed fourteen thousand.
Why this version works
Two meats, one pot. The 1906 column allows lamb, chicken or squirrel and adds "a large slice of middling meat" — salt pork — to every version. Georgia pits put chicken and pork shoulder in together. Chicken gives the broth its body and shreds into threads that hold sauce; pork shoulder gives fat and the meaty depth that chicken alone never reaches. The salt pork is seasoning, not meat.
Tomato goes in late. The Griffin method holds a quart of tomatoes back until the meat and the beans have had their hours, then gives them one hour more with two teaspoons of sugar. Acid slows everything it touches: beans put in with tomato at the start stay chalky long after the meat is gone. Late tomato also keeps its brightness instead of cooking to a flat red sweetness.
Red pepper in abundance. The 1906 recipe says exactly that — "black and red pepper in abundance" — and then says the finished stew should be "very highly seasoned." Cut the pepper back and you get a bland vegetable soup with meat in it, which is the failure mode of every timid Brunswick stew. Season the pot at the start, and again after the tomatoes, when the volume has dropped by a third.
Everything cooks until it falls apart. This is not a stew of distinct pieces. The Griffin recipe simmers three or four hours before the tomatoes even go in. Meat is cooked until the bones lift out clean, then torn; vegetables are cooked past tender until they blur into the liquid. What thickens the pot is the food itself breaking down, which is why the last hour needs stirring and a low flame.
