The booya: community event and family bond

There were many highly hyped comestibles that I’d never tried, or even heard of, until moving to Minnesota. Things like Snickers salad, which I encountered at a few bridal and baby showers early on, or Minnesota sushi—pickles slathered with cream cheese, wrapped in Karl Buddig’s meat and sliced. Same goes for State Fair fare like Tiny Tim’s mini doughnuts, corn dogs, Pronto Pups and cheese curds. But perhaps the most mystical, and most often talked about food was booya. From the time I met my husband he told me about booya. It served as the name for the celebration, the food you ate there and was sometimes even finessed into a verb.

After five years of listening to him wax poetic about it, I still had no idea what it was and he still wasn’t able to explain it. Finally, a friend who’s a radio writer and rabid East Side booya fanatic sent me a snippet of a spot she wrote featuring the stew: “Every fall in St. Paul on any given weekend, at any given park, VFW or restaurant you’re bound to find it. It’s a fundraiser, a social event, a tradition. It’s soup in a garbage can.”

Finally, we were getting somewhere. “So, it’s like chili cooked in a garbage can?” I asked my husband. The usual soft-shoe response came. Not really. It’s beyond chili. It’s like nothing I’ve ever tasted. And his most grandiose claim, it’s a state of mind.

I was able to ferret out some information on my own. First, it’s origins, or the mythology surrounding it. Though there’s some dissension over how the term came about, one story that I’ve been told is that it’s a bastardization of the word (and the approach to) bouillabaisse. Others say it’s a gypsy stew that evolved from the stone soup approach to cooking. There’s also some claim, which Minnesotans of course ignore, that it originated from Belgians who’d settled in northern Wisconsin, the only other area of the county where it is also a popular fall activity. In this neck of the woods, it’s something that’s fairly particular to St. Paul. In the fall, signs proclaiming booyas sprout as fast as leaves turn. There’s a big booya contest the first weekend of October in South St. Paul, and rumor has it that Highland Park even has kettles for rent that hold up to 350 gallons of the stuff.

At one time, my husband’s family had a booya every year, gathering together to drink and be merry and eat bowlfuls of the stuff. It started as a “holiday” where the men did all the cooking. Women typically put the food on the table during events, which, given the size of his family, was no small feat. Over the years the men’s booya went from being a meal made in a roaster in the kitchen to an event being performed in a huge stockpot. It went from a meal one afternoon at someone’s house to a weekend long celebration complete with a few beers, a lot of tall tales and many bowls of booya. Somewhere along the line, the tradition had petered off, though no one could be sure as to how or why. We reignited it five years ago and soon I had an inkling as to the why of it. Stew, or food of any kind made on a large scale, is a huge undertaking. A tremendous amount of cooking and chopping goes into booya before it’s ever fired up. Oxtails are cooked, as is chicken and pork and beef, until they fall from the bone. About 50 pounds of carrots and celery and potatoes and rutabagas and tomatoes and peppers and green beans (you get the picture) are shopped for, cleaned, cut and readied. Tents are raised, tables and chairs are set up and washed, an impromptu dish station is set up, water is boiled, spoons and bowls are cleaned. Getting a room ready to give birth in is easier. And that’s just on the first day. The second day starts before dawn, right around 6 a.m. All the ingredients are then combined in the pot and stirred for between 8 and 10 hours. We do this dance every Labor Day weekend, spending Saturday readying for the festivities, Sunday making and eating booya and Monday cleaning up and breaking down, after which point, stuffed in the most pleasant way, we collapse with exhaustion.

I’ve greeted it, in all honesty, with a mixture of enthusiasm and mild dread. After all, it’s the last long weekend of summer and it’s three long days of work. This year, however, it took on the level of poignancy for me that it has had for my husband all along. There were a number of factors both during the event and after. His grandmother, the family’s strong matriarch, reigned proudly over the event this year, which fell just a few weeks after her 100th birthday. One of his brothers who’s readying for Iraq was absent this year. And, sadly, my father-in-law’s eldest brother, a long-time and devoted participant, was also unable to make it. After fighting cancer for three years he passed away early Tuesday morning, not long after the last bowl was cleaned. It made it all the more special then when my father-in-law proclaimed proudly that at one point in the afternoon out of the nearly 100 people that were sitting in the sun, telling tales, 71 of them were family. That’s when I realized that booya is the stew that sticks families together, which is part of why it’s tough to put into words just how delicious it really is.