A slowly cooked dish containing meat and/or vegetables with seasoning and a sauce.
The word stew derives from the same source as the word stove, as do the nonculinary words typhoid and stifle. The ultimate source of these words is the Greek tuphos, meaning smoke or steam. In Vulgar Latin, this Greek word was apparently adopted as tufus, which was combined with the prefix ex to form the verb extufare, meaning to take a steam bath. When the Vulgar Latin extufare was adopted by Old High German, it was turned into a noun, stuba, meaning a heated room, which English adopted in the mid fifteenth century as stove. At first, the English word retained the same meaning as the Old High German word: that is, stove was used to refer to the kind of heated room we now call a sauna, a usage that explains why medieval medical treatises often extolled the benefits of sitting in a stove. Stove continued to be used to mean sauna until the middle of the eighteenth century, at which time the culinary sense of the word, which first emerged in the late sixteenth century, came to dominate. In French, the Vulgar Latin extufare developed rather differently than it did in German, becoming the verb estuver, which English adopted in the fourteenth century as stew. Here, too, the original meaning of the word was maintained, as stew continued to be used, even as late as the nineteenth century, to mean sauna. However, this sense of stew developed a pejorative connotation because such “hot houses” were employed as rendezvous for prostitutes and their clients; accordingly, stew often implied brothel, a usage that also survived until the nineteenth century. As the sauna and brothel senses of stew began to die away, the word developed its current culinary sense, thick soup, the connection being that stews of meat and vegetables are usually, like a sauna, smoking hot and steaming. Smoke and steam are also behind the previously mentioned relatives of stew and stove: the word stifle, which developed through French from the Vulgar Latin extufare, originally meant to smother with smoke. The word typhoid, which was adapted directly from the Greek tuphos, originally denoted any disease causing a delirious stupor similar to that induced by inhaling too much smoke.