A TikToker is going viral and meeting new friends while cooking a communal “perpetual stew.”
Annie Rauwerda runs the popular TikTok, Instagram and Twitter accounts all titled “Depths of Wikipedia,” where she highlights strange, obscure and fascinating facts and pages on the online encyclopedia (her accounts also have a Wikipedia page).
However, her accounts have also now become a way for her to document her 33-day-old soup.
In June, Rauwerda posted a TikTok video tagging this sweaty season “perpetual stew summer.”
The video showed a screengrab of a Wikipedia page that explained that “perpetual stew also known as forever soup, hunter’s pot or hunter’s stew, is a pot into which whatever foodstuffs one can find is placed and cooked.
“The pot is never or rarely emptied all the way, and ingredients and liquid are replenished as necessary. Such foods can continue cooking for decades or longer, if properly maintained.”
Rauwerda told her followers that she’s always wanted to concoct one and began simmering potato leek in her Crock-Pot at 200 degrees Fahrenheit on June 7. She planned to keep it cooking for at least five days — now it’s been 33.
Daily updates of the stew, instructions on how to RSVP to the next event (at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, July 11 at Fermi Playground in Brooklyn) and frequently asked questions are all shared on an official website.
She’s continued to update viewers, with videos every few days documenting the different vegan ingredients her friends have added to the stew. Rauwerda also put out a call to “stew-dents” near Bushwick to join the stew crew.
Her first event saw about 50 attendees, among whom it was generally agreed upon that the gathering and grub were equally “stew-pendous.”
The Sunday stews have continued for several weeks now, with people gathering in the Brooklyn park to add their ingredients to the cauldron and join the “stew-mmunity.”
The project has grown so popular Rauwerda claims she’s even been recognized in the grocery store as “stew girl.”
In the initial weeks of the stewing, Rauwerda searched for someone named Stu, Stew or even Sue to come and be welcomed as the guest of honor. In a TikTok video, she shared that she finally found her Stew person 30 days into cooking the forever soup.
A person named Stu came to the event about a month into the broth being boiled and shared how they had grown up being teased and hating their name for most of their life.
However, now after being so honored, “I love being Stu,” the person said in one of Rauwerda’s TikTok updates.
