Why not stay at home and prepare a better stew?(Chicago Tribune)

Byline: William Rice

"Dinty Moore's Beef Stew" was the name on the can's label. The label also informed potential consumers this was the authentic recipe for the dish that had made Mr. Moore's New York City restaurant famous.

Well, at age 10 or 11, eager to pursue anything that filled a plate or bowl, I fell for Mr. Moore's creation hook, line and sinker, as my father liked to say.

This "stew" contained cubes of brown meat (clumps might be a more accurate description) and chunks of potato (more of the latter than the former, I noted) and a generous amount of juice-like, brown-colored gravy. In fact, Mr. Moore's masterpiece was pretty much a study in brown, though it may have contained a few speckles of carrot and a smattering of once-green peas.

The meat was somewhat chewy, the potatoes mealy, but I barely noticed because the gravy had won my still fallow, pre-teenage heart. I licked it from the meat, crushed the potatoes with my fork to get more to adhere to them, drank it from my spoon and, when almost gone, finished my portion by rubbing the bottom and sides of the bowl with bread.

Several decades _ and many stews _ later, I would probably detect and quickly reject a canned soup or sauce redolent with sweetener and salt. In those days they added up to half of the four food groups.

The "stew," of course, is the end product of a process known as "stewing," a technique that provokes the usually staid "Larousse Gastronomique" to virtually dance a jig. "Stews should always be rich," the dictionary commands, "an intensity resulting from the mingling of flavours, extraction of juices, and breaking down of connective tissue and gelatinous substances."