Taking Inventory: Mushroom Stew

Mining and crafting is hungry work. That’s why Minecraft is full of delicious food, from healthy fruit and vegetables, like carrots and berries, to meatier choices like steak and, er, rotten flesh. Today, though, we’ll be featuring a plant-based delicacy. Our item of the month is a hearty bowl of nourishing mushroom stew!

Mushroom stew has been part of Minecraft since its very earliest days – it was added all the way back in January 2010. To put that in context, it was part of the same patch that added chests, the workbench, and the entire crafting system. In fact, mushroom stew was one of the very first items that players were able to craft.

There are two ways to get hold of mushroom stew. The easy way is to find a red mushroom and a brown mushroom, and put them into a crafting grid with a bowl. The harder way is to locate a mooshroom, because the mooshroom produces mushroom stew as part of its digestive process. Milk it with an empty bowl in your hand, and voila – a piping hot fungal treat.

You can keep that mushroom stew in your inventory for as long as you want, but eventually you’ll start getting peckish. Press and hold the use button while it’s selected in the hotbar, and you’ll slurp it down – restoring six hunger and 7.2 hunger saturation in the process. Best of all, you’ll get the bowl back – allowing you to mix up another batch immediately.

In both Minecraft and the real world, there are several types of stew. Minecraft has mushroom and rabbit, as well as beetroot soup. But in the real world, you can make a stew out of almost anything. All you need is some solid ingredients and a liquid to cook them in. The longer you simmer it for, the tastier it gets.

The word “stew” comes from the Old French word “estuver” for taking a hot bath, which in turn comes from the Latin word “extufare”, meaning “evaporate”. Stews have been made since ancient times, with the oldest stew known to humankind having been cooked from fish in pots about 15,000 years ago in coastal Japan. 

Throughout history, people have got pretty creative with stews – Amazonian tribes used the shells of turtles to boil their body parts with various other ingredients, while other cultures used the shells of large mollusks to cook food in. Almost all of the world’s oldest cookbooks feature stews of different kinds.

So next time you’re chowing down on some delicious mushroom stew – remember that you’re only the latest in a long chain of both Minecraft players and human beings, stretching all the way back to the dawn of time, all of you eating stew.