Many people regularly enjoy chicken stew because it is a tasty, warming meal. Chicken stew recipes are easy to make and there are many varieties of this dish. Chicken stew has a very interesting history and it has been enjoyed around the world for a long time.

A stew is a combination of two or more foods simmered in a liquid. Coq au vin, Hungarian goulash, beef bourguignon, and beef stroganoff are all examples of stews.

The oldest cookbook to survive, the “Apicius de re Coquinaria”, features lamb and fish stew recipes. It is not known who penned the book but there were three Romans with that name living between 1 BC and 2AD and the book is believed to date from that time.

You can actually go back even further because primitive tribes used to boil foods together, which is what a stew essentially is. Amazonian tribes uses turtle shells as pans and would boil the turtle entrails with some other ingredients. Other cultures used large shells, such as clamshells, instead of pans. Archeological evidence points to this type of cookery going back seven or eight thousand years. The invention of pottery, about ten thousand years ago, made cooking stews easier.

Fowl such as chicken has been domesticated for thousands of years and chicken stew has been a longstanding popular dish. Different cultures have different chicken stews, such as the peanut butter chicken stew preferred in parts of Africa and the spicy chicken stew made in Morocco.

Different Kinds of Chicken Stew Recipes

Chicken booyah is a very flavorful chicken recipe. It is like a thick soup or a thin stew and is very popular in northeast Wisconsin. The first Belgian immigrants arrived in Wisconsin in 1853 and they spoke Walloon rather than English or French. It is thought that the word booyah derived from the word bouillon and a Belgian who did not know how to spell bouillon just wrote down how the word sounded to him.

What is Southern Chicken Stew?

You might have tried southern chicken stew, which is a traditional North Carolina dish. This stew contains a parboiled whole chicken in a milk or cream based broth, butter, salt, and pepper, amongst other ingredients. Southern chicken stew varies in color from white to yellow, depending how much butter has been used. It varies from thin in consistency to creamy and thick. It is common to serve saltine crackers with this dish.

Southern chicken stew is often served in the coolest months of the year and the phrase “chicken stew” can refer to the gathering itself rather than the food. A chicken stew recipe is usually thought of as a comfort food because these recipes are cheap to make, enjoyed by nearly everybody and they are warming and flavorful. This is a common dish served at social gatherings such as church fellowships, family reunions, and community fundraisers.

At these events, the chicken stew will often be prepared in a big stainless steel or cast iron cooking pot, perhaps outdoors over an open fire. You might get rice, coleslaw or grilled cheese sandwiches served on the side.