Kentucky’s other pride and joy: burgoo
OWENSBORO, Ky. — A lot of tasty things come from Kentucky. Some, like bourbon and barbecue, have traveled the country and the world, staking the Bluegrass State’s claim for producing top-notch whiskey and delicious slow-cooked meats.
Others, like the regional specialty known as burgoo, never really left their home turf. Outside of western Kentucky, there are few restaurants serving the meaty stew that’s become a spring and summer staple here.
Others, like the regional specialty known as burgoo, never really left their home turf. Outside of western Kentucky, there are few restaurants serving the meaty stew that’s become a spring and summer staple here.
Kentuckians aren’t complaining. They’re happy to have burgoo to themselves. May kicks off the burgoo season in Owensboro, a city of 65,000 on the Ohio River between Cincinnati and St. Louis. Rising from the green, rolling countryside, Owensboro — about a five-hour drive from Chicago — prides itself as the burgoo capital of the world.
(Photo courtesy of St. Mary Magdalene Parish)
Owensboro 2009 Bar-B-Q and Burgoo Festival dates:
• Aug. 29, St. Columbia Parish
• Sept. 13, Ursuline Sisters-Mount St. Joseph
• Sept. 19, St. Stephen’s Cathedral
• Sept. 26, Immaculate Parish
• Sept. 27, St. Mary of the Woods Parish
• Oct. 24, Carmel Home
EATING THERE: Owensboro restaurants serving BBQ and burgoo include the Moonlite BBQ Inn, 2840 Parrish Ave., (270) 684-8143; the Old Hickory Inn, 338 Washington Ave., (270) 926-9000; George’s Bar-B-Q, 1362 E. Fourth St., (270) 926-9276, and Old South Barbecue, 3523 Highway 54, (270) 926-6464.
STAYING THERE: Lodging options include Ramada Inn, 3136 E. 2nd St., (270) 685-3941; Days Inn, 3720 New Hartford Rd., (270) 684-9621; Fairfield Inn, 800 Salem Dr., (270) 688-8887; Holiday Inn Express, 3220 W. Parrish Ave., (270) 685-2433, and Helton House Bed & Breakfast, 103 E. 23rd St., (270) 926-7117.
TIP:While in Owensboro stop at the International Bluegrass Museum, a place dedicated to the history and preservation of this other regional favorite. Travelers also can view the oldest sassafras tree in the world, an Owensboro landmark located on the front lawn of E.M. Ford & Co. The 300-year-old tree has a circumference of 16 feet.
Kentuckians aren’t complaining. They’re happy to have burgoo to themselves. May kicks off the burgoo season in Owensboro, a city of 65,000 on the Ohio River between Cincinnati and St. Louis. Rising from the green, rolling countryside, Owensboro — about a five-hour drive from Chicago — prides itself as the burgoo capital of the world.
Once the two-day International Bar-B-Q Festival ends there in early May, the competition begins in earnest as Roman Catholic parishes around town start holding their annual picnics and fund-raisers, which feature slow-roasting haunches of mutton and pork, hundreds of chickens and 75-gallon kettles of burgoo.
Ken Bosley, co-owner of the Moonlite BBQ Inn and a founder of the Bar-B-Q Festival 31 years ago, said people travel to Owensboro from all over the country for the event and the parish picnics that follow. “It’s like a big reunion,” Bosley said.
The Moonlite is a local institution, a family-owned restaurant that started in 1963 with four stools and two booths and now seats 325, employs 145 and produces more than $5 million in annual sales. At least six Bosleys work there. And every year it sells thousands of gallons of burgoo. Ken Bosley’s son and marketing manager, Pat Bosley, said the secret of Moonlite’s burgoo and barbecue is no mystery.
“Our secret is we cook,” he said. “We take no shortcuts.”
Locals say burgoo, which may be a bastardized spelling of a French word, burgout, actually arrived with the Welsh coal miners via Virginia 200 years ago. Besides strong backs, they brought their sheep and cooking traditions. The origins of the dish itself are fuzzy. The British Navy served a soup called burgoo that was an oatmeal-like porridge made from bulgar grain. Some say it’s derived from the Irish Mulligan Stew.
But the burgoo served in Daviess County is unique, a thick, savory stew rich with several meats — always mutton, but also chicken, pork and sometimes beef, as well as numerous vegetables. Burgoo has a hint of tartness due to the vinegar and lemon juice, and is redolent of pepper, but not overly piquant.
Burgoo might be a religion in these parts, but including beans in the stew could be considered blasphemy in this friendly, folksy city.
“Lima beans don’t go in burgoo,” Pat Bosley said. “Once you add ’em, it becomes vegetable soup.”
Retired steelworker Vince Wink, 71, agreed. Wink said the burgoo he ate as a boy was “kind of heavy on the meat side. We don’t like to call it soup — it’s burgoo. And beans don’t belong in burgoo. You don’t want to put anything in there that takes away from meat. That’s the way I was raised.”
Wink and his father helped the newly formed St. Pius X Parish develop its barbecue and burgoo fund-raiser decades ago.
“We helped them with their first picnic. Since then new people have moved into that parish and they’ve gotten very modern. I hate to say it, but they use baby lima beans in their burgoo. Some of them ought to be excommunicated,” he said, chuckling. “I know one woman who once helped out at the picnics, but quit over the bean issue. She said: ‘I won’t help you if you use beans.’ And she meant it.”
The Rev. Patrick Biddle, an Owensboro native and pastor at St. Mary Magdalene Parish, denied that local Catholic officials have weighed in on the beans in burgoo debate.
“If the clergy was out there helping prepare the burgoo,” Biddle said, “they might have a voice. But they’d probably be told to go back to the church where they belong.
“Personally, I wouldn’t put beans in burgoo,” he added, almost sneering at the heresy.
Biddle reported that a daylong parish barbecue and burgoo picnic can raise anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000. “We’re out there at 4 a.m. and everything’s ready to be served by 4 p.m. The men of the parish pretty much do all the cooking.”
Eighty-year-old L.K. Burcham said St. Pius X Parish has split from the beanless burgoo orthodoxy.
“We catch a lot of hell for using lima beans in our burgoo and get teased a lot for it,” Burcham admitted. “But people must like it because we sell a lot of it.”
He said St. Pius X has gone high-tech, even building a “burgoo barn” to hold its 12, 60-gallon kettles and electric motors operating the automatic paddles that stir the stew.
“We used to stir by hand,” the retired meat buyer said, “but somebody came up with the idea that’s too much work.”
Mark Taylor is an Indiana-based free-lance writer.