Woodward on Researching Brunswick Stew in Virginia
By Stan Woodward, supplementing his 2015 interview with Saddler Taylor and Tom Davenport.
The original feature-length version of this film—Brunswick Stew: A Southern Americana Folk Heritage Tradition—was produced by Stan Woodward for the people of Brunswick County, Virginia, who honor this chicken-based stew tradition and maintain it through a system of stew masters and stew crews to raise money to meet local needs. This documentary premiered at the Virginia State Fair on “Brunswick Stew Day” in 1998. It was a day devoted to the stew masters and stew crews from Brunswick County, which claims to be “The Original Home of Brunswick Stew." Each stew master and his crew cooked the stew with its unique recipe. People attending the fair could sample them all. In the afternoon the stew masters were paraded through the fairgrounds and taken to an auditorium, where they gathered with friends, relatives, invitees, and folks with Brunswick County roots returning from all over. They attended the “World Premier” of this documentary. All stew masters received special recognition and a framed citation signed by the Governor recognizing these men as “Virginia Treasures.”
The shorter version—with the title Brunswick Stew: The Pride of Brunswick County, Virginia, was edited down from the other for use on public television. Both versions include information on a conflicting claim made in Brunswick, Georgia, that Brunswick Stew Originated in that state. Woodward elaborated further on this in a sequel, his film Brunswick Stew: Georgia Named Her; Georgia Claims Her. The longer version goes into greater historical detail in tracking down the story of the origin of the stew. It includes an interview with a relative of Creed Haskins, the legislator representing Brunswick County at the time the county was founded. He held fox hunts for fellow legislators at which his freedman camp cook, Uncle Jimmy Matthews, in 1828 prepared and gave the name to the first Brunswick stew cooked on the banks of the Nottoway River on the Haskins plantation.
These films come from Stan Woodward’s suite of documentaries about a family of Southern agrarian communal stews, all cooked on open fires in huge black iron pots, by stew masters and their crews, using folk-heritage recipes with secret ingredients, and sold as fundraisers for local community organizations. The works include the overview film Southern Stews: A Taste of the South and individual films on Georgia Brunswick Stew, Georgia Hogshead Brunswick Stew and Stewbilee, on South Carolina Hash and Frogmore Stew, Chicken Bog of the Pee Dee, and Gallivant’s Ferry Stump Meeting Chicken Bog, and on the Sheep Stew of Dundas, Virginia.
