The Origins Of Pot-Au-Feu, The Simmering Forever 'Mother Broth'
We've all come home after a long day of work, excited to dig into a big plate of leftovers from a dinner you'd had a few nights earlier, only to find that the food in your to-go box has gone bad.
However, there are certain foods that, while not immortal, will stay edible for a considerable amount of time. According to Insider, honey's high sugar content and low levels of moisture give it an essentially endless shelf life. Honey will crystallize, but it only needs to be heated to become viscous again. Peanut butter can last for years, though it'll probably taste pretty bad after about a year. Canned foods will also last for quite some time until the can itself begins to break down.
But none of these foods represent dynamic dishes. Can any meals last forever? Apparently, there are numerous restaurants around the world that make a type of broth that is stewed and served indefinitely.
Pot-au-feu, the broth that lasts forever
According to Atlas Obscura, pot-au-feu is an age-old tradition that boils down to the practice of keeping the same pot of broth simmering for years, all the while using it to prepare meals. Pot-au-feu is, "...also known as perpetual stew, forever soup, hunter's pot, bottomless broth, master stock, or mother broth." The practice likely originated in China, where lou mei (master stock), which is used to cook meat, can be passed down generationally.
Atlas Obscura also explains that Europe has a rich history of creating pot-au-feu broths.
They cite food historian Reay Tannahill's book "Food in History", which tells us that inns across Europe would keep a cauldron of broth brewing and add new ingredients on a daily basis. Additionally, Food in History discusses the potentially apocryphal stories of two pot-au-feu cauldrons in France that had been unchanged for hundreds of years. One of the said pots boiled from the 1400s until 1945, when it was tragically snuffed out during a World War II bombing.
Pot-au-feu in modern restaurants
Today, a number of restaurants around the world offer soups that are prepared in decades-old pot-au-feu broths. In Bangkok, Thailand, you can enjoy a bowl of beef noodle soup prepared in a broth that has been stewing for upwards of 45 years at Wattana Panich, per NPR. Owner Nattapong Kaweeantawong insists that the soup receptacle is cleaned every evening. However, some broth is always kept simmering overnight, which serves as the base for the following day's soup.
According to HowStuffWorks, at New York City's Louro, Chef David Santos has a perpetually-simmering cauldron of pork broth. This pot-au-feu, which Santos' team refers to as Stu, subsists on a variety of leftover ingredients from the kitchen and originated as a means of avoiding food waste.
Atlas Obscura tells us about Tokyo, Japan's Otafuku, which has been serving oden ladled from the same pot of broth for decades. This pot-au-feu of tofu and fish stew, "...would be going on 100 today, but the previous batch was lost in 1945 during World War II bombing."