Sorry, Brunswick Stew. You’re adopted.

BY ERIK ANDERSON Special to The News-Post

When it comes to exploring historical connections, sometimes the phrase “just a coincidence” is employed too dismissively. Take the case of Frederick County’s tenuous connection to the old pottage recipe known as Brunswick Stew.

Bob Hilton, a 90-year-old retired real estate professional who spent most of his life in Frederick County, remembers his grandmother teaching him how to make the stew on their family farm near Mount Airy in the 1940s. He recalls it “contained just about anything” but thinks it almost always had beans, hot red peppers, tomatoes, greens and wild game meat.

She told a story about the recipe originating with a cousin who had been a Civil War camp cook and then later worked at the train depot in Brunswick. In her telling, that’s where the name for the stew came from.

But when Hilton moved to Brunswick, Georgia, eight years ago and learned his new town claimed to be the origin of Brunswick Stew, he began to see a few holes in his grandmother’s story. He remembered that Brunswick, Maryland, had been called Berlin until about 30 years after the Civil War, and the more he researched the topic, the more he found competing origin stories.

“I’ve given up on trying to prove its authenticity,” he said with a laugh. “It’s just a fun thing to try to do. When you’re 90, finding fun things to do is hard.”

Fortunately, Joyce White, a food historian and vice president of Hammond-Harwood House Museum in Annapolis, can provide some clarity on the topic. In an email, she suggested separate but related origin stories for the name Brunswick

Stew and the recipe it usually describes.

She said multiple types of “slowcooking, set-it-and-forget-it” meals developed in different places at different times. Native Americans had a type of succotash made from corn, beans and game meat (such as squirrel) or fish. European settlers