There’s a stew I make when I’m sad.

Not blue, not annoyed, not bored. Sad. The kind of sad that sits low in your chest and won’t be talked out of you. The kind that shows up uninvited on a Tuesday and rearranges the furniture.

The day I closed the supper club for good, in the fall of 2022, I drove home from Reno with the keys in a Ziploc bag on the passenger seat. Rosemary was in the back, head on her paws, doing that thing where she pretends she isn’t watching me. I didn’t cry in the truck. I cried later, in the kitchen, while I was browning lamb shoulder in olive oil. Which I think is the appropriate place to cry, if you’re going to.

That’s the stew. That’s the one.

Why Stew, And Not Something Else

Sad food has rules, even if nobody writes them down. It can’t be fast. Speed is the enemy. If a meal is over in fifteen minutes you’ve just had a snack and now you’re sad with a clean kitchen, which is worse.

It can’t be fussy either. No tweezers. No reductions you have to babysit like a colicky baby. The point of sad cooking is that the cooking itself is the thing. You’re not feeding yourself so much as you’re keeping your hands busy and your nose pointed at something good while the bad weather passes through.

Stew gets this. A good stew is mostly waiting. You do twenty minutes of work and then you stand near the stove and exist for three hours. The kitchen warms up. The windows fog. The dog comes in to check on you and stays. That’s the whole medicine.

What Goes In

Lamb shoulder, bone in if you can find it. Two pounds, cubed rough. The bone is doing real work here, throwing collagen into the pot, making the broth that thing where it sticks to your lips a little. If your butcher will sell you the bone separately, take it.

A pound of dried gigante beans, soaked overnight. You can use cannellini in a pinch but the gigantes have this nutty heft to them, almost waxy when they’re cooked right, and on a sad day texture matters more than usual. Phaseolus coccineus, technically, the runner bean family, big as your thumbnail.

Onions, three of them, sliced into half moons. Six cloves of garlic, smashed not minced. A bunch of rosemary, which I use for everything because of course I do, and which I keep in a coffee can on the porch. A handful of dried porcini, broken up, soaked in hot water for twenty minutes. Save that water. It’s the secret.

A can of San Marzanos, crushed by hand. A glass of dry white wine, something you’d actually drink. Two anchovies, melted into the oil at the start, which sounds wrong if you’ve never done it but which adds about eighteen percent more umami to anything it touches and which you will not taste as fish, I promise.

Salt, pepper, bay. A long strip of lemon peel thrown in at the end.

The Method

Brown the lamb hard in olive oil. In batches. Crowd the pan and you steam instead of sear, and you’ll regret it. Get a real crust on it, the brown edges almost black in places. Take it out. Set it aside.

Drop the heat. Anchovies into the fat, mash them with a wooden spoon until they disappear. Onions in, with a big pinch of salt, and cook them slow until they’re translucent and starting to gold up at the edges. Twenty minutes, maybe more. Don’t rush this. You’re not in a hurry. You said so yourself.

Garlic in, thirty seconds, no more. Tomato paste, a heaping spoonful, cook it dark. Wine in, scrape the pan, let it reduce by half. Tomatoes in. Lamb back in with whatever juices ran out of it. Porcini and their soaking liquid, careful with the grit at the bottom of the bowl. Beans. Rosemary tied with twine so you can fish it out later. Bay. Enough water or stock to just cover.

Lid on, oven at 300, three hours. Maybe three and a half. You’ll know because the lamb will give up and fall apart when you nudge it with a spoon, and the beans will be soft but still holding their shape, and the broth will have gone from watery to glossy.

Lemon peel in for the last fifteen minutes. Taste. Adjust. Probably more salt than you think.

Eat It Slow

Wide bowl. A piece of bread torn off something rustic, charred a little on a dry pan. Olive oil on top, the good stuff you’ve been saving. Maybe a few flakes of salt.

Sit down. Don’t read while you eat. Don’t put a podcast on. Just eat. Let the bowl warm your hands. Notice that the lamb tastes like the inside of a fall afternoon and the beans taste like something your great-aunt would have made if your great-aunt had been Greek.

Halfway through, you might notice you’re not crying anymore. Or you might still be. Both are fine.

What Stew Knows

I think about Rosemary in the truck that day a lot. She didn’t try to fix anything. She just sat there with me, doing her job, which was being present. Stew does the same work. It doesn’t promise tomorrow will be better. It just says here, eat this, the world is still feeding you.

When I make this now, I make a lot of it. I freeze it in pint containers and label them with a Sharpie. Sad Stew, October. Sad Stew, January. They sit in the freezer like a row of small lifeboats. You hope you don’t need them. You’re glad they’re there.

The supper club is gone. The keys are in a drawer somewhere. Rosemary is asleep at my feet as I write this, sixteen pounds heavier and going gray around the muzzle. The stew is the same stew. That’s the deal it offers you.