So, basically, the code base I’ve been working on is a perpetual stew, maintained for decades

If anyone has ever done this at home, I want to know what ingredients you used!

Assuming you are only doing this for one meal a day, and not eating it for all your meals.

You'd want to keep the meat as lean as possible for longevity purposes.

Alternately, when you cook it, you can either skim the liquid fat off the top (use a large spoon) or absorb it with slices of bread (drag it across the surface and they'll soak up the fat).

Haven't had it in decades, but ISTR that it was mostly done at Christmas time and usually was cooked for about two weeks.

[edit] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyanese_pepperpot

Long time ago working student summer construction jobs in Siberia we had "perpetual tea" going for several months - several electric tea kettles were always on at close to boiling, and we were putting into them, without any selection, whatever green stuff was growing higher than 2 inches - ie. above the moss - in the pine forest around. And I don't remember pulling old stuff ever out, only adding new one into the kettles.

One problem I encounter is that some ingredients disintegrate badly (like noodles), which is not a problem when making it in a huge restaurant pot, but becomes a problem when you have a typical large home pot. I have resorted to cooking noodles separately and then adding them to my bowl, rather than putting them in the pot.

Generally, I also want more ingredients ideas that I like, which is still an open problem. Sometimes I add something new and it destroys the taste.

Most starch and carb-heavy items wouldn't be a good fit.

I'd assume thickeners have different behavior when cooked for 1 week+, as you start to get some byproducts you don't normally see in "fresh" cooking.

If I consume 1/3 of a well mixed soup every day and top it up to full, then in a week, only about (1/3)^7 = 0.05% of the first day stuff remains. You don't really have to worry about the longevity of the ingredients.

Including bones / carcasses.

The ones I take out after boiling for a while: onions, bell peppers, meat bones.

Ones that are kinda okay: beans of various sort (become too soft, yet don't disintegrate fast enough, and collect at the bottom of pot so difficult to take out), cooked rice.

Definitely bad: noodles.

Replace them with a heartier starch like lentils or farro. As a bonus you also end up with better micro and macronutrients than you'd get from enriched egg noodles or the like.

My current meal prep stew comprises olive oil, pork, leeks, garlic, carrots, mushrooms, lentils, onions, tomato paste, and kale. For seasoning I'll throw in red pepper flakes and italian seasoning along with some balsamic vinegar if I don't get the depth of flavor I want. A little gorgonzola or other blue cheese on the side really sets it off.

Like in the hateful 8 film.

You didn't have contact info, so I'm contacting you in this comment if you've gathered more info on it. I'm also curious how the online part influences perception.

Basically anything above 60°C is fine, same as below 4°C.

I always treated the "best before" on bags of frozen veggies as "avoid after" and am very happy to discover now that frozen vegetables apparently remain safe indefinitely. This will save me a bit of money.

And now I'm more open to trying this perpetual stew thing too.

I just made soup from a bag of a bean mix that I know is definitely more than 10 years old.

Examples are on-living molecules whether inorganic simple elements or complex thermo resistant proteins leftover from other forms of life like fungi.

That said, there's nothing special in a forever stew that makes it particularly more susceptible to this risk. The toxins don't reproduce (unless there's some fucky crystallization phenomenon, but that's sci fi speculation), and if there is some thermoresistant toxin introduced, then it will probably be dilluted quickly.

Anything that's been held at 136°F or higher for an hour or so is essentially sterile from a food safety standpoint.

i have tried few times to achieve the same - or okay, at-least-similar - taste, at home.. but no way. Just hours are not enough :/

Though nowadays, this thing is .. mostly gone.

https://www.perpetualstew.club

https://www.grubstreet.com/2023/07/annie-rauwerda-perpetual-...

https://archive.ph/iGGJz

One of the adults would have a massive pot setup on a gas burner, and we'd pour in all the random cans of soup to heat up together. Throughout the day you'd grab a styrofoam cup and ladle in some "suicide soup", then try go guess what mystery chunks you were eating.

Not perpetual but definitely "whatever you had" soup :)

Everyone brought along what they could, the teacher tossed it into a pot, and by lunchtime that was it.

Per my grandfather's telling, squirrel was not uncommon, and any meat was welcome.

Mostly, it was hot and salty and could be drank from a cup :)

  > See also:    
  > Ship of Theseus

It's interesting to me because an encyclopedia generally spells everything out for you -- that's it's purpose, to explicitly explain things. The "tangentially-related See Also," on the other hand, demands that the connection be made in the mind of the reader, without explaining the connection explicitly.

Replacing it all at once can be expensive and wasteful. You also wind up with a sub-optimal flavor profile for several batches when you do a total reset.

Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;

Some like it hot, some like it cold,

Some like it in the pot, nine days old.

The word “stew” for example feels like how a pot of stew feels like. The warm cozy feeling of the word matches the actual warm cozy feeling of watching the pot of stew