PURVIS STEW

Given the kind of day it is today – cool and rainy (finally, thank goodness!) it seemed like a great day to make a pot of stew.  Comfort food, and since I like to cook it in the oven, the added warmth of having the oven on all afternoon is an extra plus.  Yes, it was a good day to make stew.

As I thawed out the meat there was a decision to be made:  would it be Hainsworth stew?  Or Purvis stew?  The regular, safe, ordinary gravy-based stew, or the weird concoction written in my mother’s handwriting that includes tomato soup and chopped cabbage along with all the regular meat and veggies normally found in stew? 

It had been quite a while, I decided ... out came the tomato soup.

Since tomorrow is Father’s Day I had been thinking about the man whose surname this recipe has taken on.  I smiled as I peeled the potatoes; he didn’t even know that he had a stew named after him.  Eons ago, in my growing up years, it was just ‘stew’.  It was only after joining this Hainsworth clan that I had to differentiate between two kinds of stew – after I learned how to make the meeker, plain, gravy version.

And, personally, I’ve often wondered how much dad liked mom’s version of stew.  I remember the food that his mother served – it was good, and wholesome, and plain.  I cannot imagine Grandma Purvis being so adventurous as to experiment with tomatoes and cabbage in a stew, let alone cooking the meat with some brown sugar and vinegar first to give it a bit of a sweet and sour flavour.  I think that would have been way outside the box for her.  Dad probably didn’t have ‘Purvis’ stew for the first thirty years of his life.

Which means, of course that it is not named correctly.  In the interests of not putting my mother’s maiden name out there on the Internet, though, we’ll just leave that one be.

It’s times like today when I’m thinking about such questions, and there is no one left who can answer them, that I enter into the world of regrets that all grown children visit from time to time.  Why do I only have my vague, one-sided memories to go on?  Surely there were times when we could have had conversations that covered silly, every day things like this!  Why don’t kids pay attention to these details that will matter to them some day?

The memories I do have of meal times are sweet though; our places at the table were him at the head of the table and me to his left, just around the corner.  I always had to watch him if green beans were on the menu.  He didn’t like them and if I wasn’t paying attention the serving on my plate mysteriously got bigger; it was a game we played.  As far as I can remember I never had to make him take back a scoop of stew, but I know mom only made that new-fangled dish, chilli con carne, on nights he wasn’t going to be home for supper because he said it was too spicy.  Something just tells me that dad would have preferred Hainsworth stew over his namesake.

And, for some reason, my sisters insist that I have the recipe wrong – that’s not how mom made it.  I had to show them the page in the wedding shower recipe book that mom gave me that proves it was her recipe.  Again, it would be nice to ask mom if her recipes evolved over time and I just got the 1973 version?  Something else I’ll never know.  All I know is that I’m the only one who makes it this way.

Which, ironically, means that it is only made by me – now a Hainsworth – so technically it should be the one called ‘Hainsworth’ stew. 

How’s that for a weird twist of Fate?  Something for my kids to try to figure out someday after I’m gone.