The short answer is no, a soup and a stew are not the same thing… but I’m not allowed to type 15 words and call it an article. They’d fire me. So, hold onto your spoons, I’m about to drop some rich and hearty knowledge on you.
What is the difference between soup and stew?
The best place to begin this knowledge journey is at the intersection of food and language. The more I learn about the English language, the more I realize it is sloppy, chunky, often delicious, and usually warm. Much like a beef stew.
We here at Let Me Look That Up tend to take a “descriptive” approach to words and language. What is descriptivism you ask? You should read more about it when you have the time, but in short, we think if you put something in a bowl and call it soup, all you have to do is get a few people to agree with you, and boom, you have a soup. The more people you get to agree with you the stronger your case is. For example, the English-speaking world decided that chowder is a dairy-based soup, but then Boston comes rolling in and decides their soup recipe is going to have a tomato base. They wanted to still call it chowder, but no one else agrees with them. Eventually, enough Bostonians kept saying chowder while eating their tomato soup, so now Boston clam chowder is now a thing.
In many ways “soup” is anything that we agree to call “soup”. But that is way too vague to be useful in any debate you may find yourself in. We need more substance!
Let’s turn to our friends at Merriam-Webster:
Soup: a liquid food especially with a meat, fish, or vegetable stock as a base and often containing pieces of solid food
Stew: fish or meat usually with vegetables prepared by stewing.
Good job MW. I’m pretty sure you are not supposed to use a derivative of the word in the definition. I think they call that circular logic. We need to try a better approach.
The Platonic Ideal of Soup
If soup and stew are on opposite ends of a line, let’s take a moment to look at the extreme soup end of that line. The food we find here at the "Ideal Soup" end of the line is a pureed, complete liquid, such as a French bisque. Its main ingredients probably include some protein; meat, fish, or a fancy bean, like lentils, and some combination of vegetable elements like a carrot, or an onion, or even a blended sweet potato. It can be served hot or cold, but it was definitely brought to a boil at some point during the cooking process. Maybe it was made in a pot on the stove, maybe in a Dutch Oven, or maybe in a slow cooker, and was left to simmer over low heat for a bit.
Now I know what you are thinking: Gazpacho. You don’t simmer gazpacho, and it is definitely a soup. We’ll concede, a soup doesn’t HAVE to be brought to a boil. But this opens up a whole mess of problems. If gazpacho is a soup, then is a vegetable smoothie actually a vegetable soup? Is a cup of pudding technically a soup can? Can I call myself a home cook if I let my ice cream melt and serve it as a soup? We’ve descended into madness again.
The Platonic Ideal of Stew
Okay, I took a short break to finish off a tall glass of one of my favorite soups, a cookies-and-cream shake. It was delicious. Now it is time we explore the other extreme end of the soup-stew continuum. What is "Ideal Stew"? In our estimation, the ideal stew recipe is a meat stew, like beef stew or lamb stew. Chunks of bite-sized, or slightly bigger than bite-sized, protein cooked in a broth or bouillon with some chunks of vegetables. If we are being classic about it the veggies would include potatoes, carrots, and celery.
We think there are two important parts to every stew recipe. First, the size of the chunks. They really should be about bite-sized or a bit bigger. Second, the amount of liquid. A stew uses less liquid than a soup. The broth that the protein and vegetables are cooked in can’t cover the chunks. The liquid should function more like a braising liquid and less like a bath. If your solid pieces are floating in the cooking liquid, we are venturing back into soup territory.
To make a really good stew, this whole concoction usually needs longer cooking times. Like with soup, there are several cooking methods to choose from; stovetop, crockpot, oven, or even an instant pot. The verb "to stew" means "to simmer over a low heat" for quite some time. Long enough that the broth boils down and thickens up. In fact, you could even add a roux (a fancy French word for gravy, basically flour and fat cooked till it thickens) to the broth, or even in place of the broth. Other recipes use thickening elements like cornstarch or mashed potatoes.
The Messy Middle
Now that we have explored the concepts of ideal soup and ideal stew, we should explore the middle zone. The team at Let Me Look That Up tried really hard to find a clean line between soups and stews and we just couldn’t come up with a precise answer. We might all agree that your grandma's chunky chicken noodle soup is comfort food, but based on the above definitions, maybe it is actually chicken stew? It's hard to tell. Other difficult examples include chilis and chowders. Depending on your family's recipe, they could be a hearty soup or a runny stew. I've had some bowls of ramen so full of solid ingredients that the noodles weren't floating anymore, is that still a soup? I don’t know!
A helpful quiz
To help you understand if the bowl in front of you is a soup or a stew, we created this handy quiz:
Are the chunks smaller than bite-sized?
Are the solid ingredients sitting fully submerged, or at least floating?
If dumped from your spoon does the majority of the dish pour (rather than plop)?
Was the food cooking time less than an hour (or no cooking at all)?
Do most people call what you are eating “soup”?
For each of those questions, you answered yes, give one point to “soup”. For each, you answered no, give one point to “stew”. If one category, soup or stew, gets 4 points or better, then you have a clear winner. If you only get 3 points, then we can’t help you. We recommend you be like the city of Boston and just use another word, like “stoup”, that is obviously wrong, but that you like. If you stick with your own word long enough that it starts trending, you will be on your way to being right.
If you’d like to hear more about our confusion over soups and stews, listen to our podcast episode Soups, Stews, & Chowder. Otherwise, you can just take a can of SpaghettiOs to your next family dinner and ask if anyone would like some soup. Let us know how that goes for you.
SEO by Tally&Mass
Comments