The Daily Southerner, Tarboro, NC

Local News

September 24, 2009

Wooten making his famous Brunswick stew

T.J. ROYAL

The Edgecombe County Cultural Arts Council has enlisted the help of a local Brunswick stew-cooking expert to help raise funds during History Day on Saturday.

George Wooten, 58, of Crisp will be selling quarts of his particular stew for $6.50 each and will also provide information on how it was started and how it was cooked over a wood fire back more than 150 years ago.

He has been cooking his Brunswick stew for fund-raisers since 1988, mainly for churches and non-profit organizations from Tarboro to Greenville and Wilson. Saturday will be his first fund-raiser making the stew for the Blount-Bridgers House, where he will be set up during Living History Day.

"I've been making it since I was five-years-old with my mother," he added.

Wooten's stew consists of chicken, cream-style corn, butterbeans, tomatoes, potatoes, salt, pepper and sugar.

But to get it to that familiar texture and color involves literally hours of stirring it within pots. "It's something that you have to enjoy. It's a lot of stirring, a lot of work," taking around 10 hours to cook a batch of around 300 quarts, he said.

The stew has to be stirred consistently, "every square inch" of the pot covered, because within five minutes the stew can settle and stick to the pot, completely ruining the cooking hardware, he said.

"It's a lot of work, so I don't go out looking for" more opportunities than he already has to cook his stew, Wooten said. He also does not make the stew for his own consumption.

"I can cook 1,200 quarts at a time" with his largest cooking pots, Wooten said. For the Blount-Bridgers fundraiser, he'll likely cook around 100 quarts.

He said that when he tries to cook it in smaller quantities, less than 50 quarts, the result hasn't turned out so well. Three hundred to 400 quarts is the amount he is most comfortable cooking.

Along with cooking a small amount over a fire, Wooten will explain part of the history of the stew. He said that people in Brunswick County, Va., which borders North Carolina, began cooking it around 1830. It quickly caught on as a political fund-raiser tool.

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