Harland’s Brunswick Stew in Common Sense in the Household (1871) Brunswick Stew is a thick tomato-based stew usually made with lima or butter beans, okra, corn, and meats such as beef, pork, chicken, or squirrel. In Harland believes the stew is named after New Brunswick county, Virginia, where squirrel is the main ingredient. Margaret Mitchell mentions that Brunswick stew was served at the Twelve Oaks plantation picnic but does not tell if the main ingredient was pork, beef, or squirrel. “At a distance great enough to keep the smoke away from the Wilkes’ guests, ” Mitchell writes, “the meats cooking over long pits and the huge iron wash-pots from which the succulent odors of barbecue sauce and Brunswick stew floated. Mr. Wilkes always had at least a dozen darkies busy running back and forth with trays to serve the guests.”
A classic recipe, probably the first published, is by Marion Harland’s [Mary Virginia Terhune] Common Sense in the Household (1871), New York, Scribner & Co. see http://books.google.com/books?id=Zj4EAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA217&dq=marion+harland+picnic&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dkW_UdLKKsTp0AG91YGICw&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=brunswick%20stew&f=false . Also http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/books/book_30.cfm
Squirrels: The large gray squirrel is seldom eaten at the North, but in great request in Virginia and other Southern States. It is generally barbecued, precisely as are rabbits; broiled, fricasseed, or–most popular of all–made into a Brunswick stew. This is named from Brunswick County, Virginia, and is a famous dish–or was–at the political and social picnics. known as barbecues. I am happy to be able to give a receipt for this stew that is genuine and explicit, and for which I am indebted to a Virginia housekeeper.
2 squirrels–3, if small.
1 quart of tomatoes -peeled and sliced.
1 pint butter-beans, or Lima.
6 potatoes, parboiled and sliced.
6 ears of green corn cut from the cob.
1/2 lb. butter.
1/2 ” fat salt pork.
1 teaspoonful ground black pepper.
Half a teaspoonful cayenne.
1 gallon water.
1 tablespoonful salt.
2 teaspoonfuls white sugar.
1 onion, minced small.
Put on the water with the salt in it, and boil five minute. Put in the onion, beans, corn, pork or bacon cut into shreds, potatoes, pepper, and the squirrels, which must first be cut into joints and laid in cold salt and water to draw out the blood. Cover closely and stew two and a half hours very slowly, stirring frequently from the bottom. Then add the tomatoes and sugar, and stow an hour longer. Ten minutes before you take it from the fire add the butter, cut into bits the size of a walnut, rolled in flour. Give a final boil, taste to see that it is seasoned to your liking, and turn into a soup-tureen. It is eaten from soup-plates. Chickens may be substituted for squirrels.