Over 50 years ago, Nattapong Kaweenuntawong’s grandfather started boiling a pot of beef stew at his restaurant and it hasn’t stopped simmering since. Now, three generations later, Kaweenuntawong is still serving from that same soup base that his grandfather started. While each evening the soup is properly stored and the pot is cleaned, the family leaves a bit of the soup still simmering overnight and into the morning when it’s replenished.
“We never make it new, instead, we store it every night and we add new ingredients and water to it everyday,” Kaweenuntawong told Business Insider. He made sure to add that the cauldron the soup is boiled in “never gets empty.”
The family restaurant Wattana Panich has served the soup to numerous tourists throughout the world that have heard about the soup’s aged, distinct yet delicious flavor and have specifically traveled to taste it. This isn’t to discount the locals who have eaten from that same soup from childhood to adulthood, with many of them significantly younger than when the soup first started to boil.
Some of the soup’s ingredients include garlic, cinnamon, black pepper, cilantro root, and nearly a dozen Chinese herbs along with goat and beef. The soup bubbles inside an eye-catching cauldron that’s about five feet in diameter, filled to the brim as Kaweenuntawong or another member of his family frequently and consistently stir the cauldron throughout the business day. The soup has been in the family for so long that members can taste it or just look at it and instantly know what ingredients need to be refilled, refreshed, or renewed.
“Since my grandfather’s time, we’ve never really had a set recipe about how much of each ingredient to put in. So the person making the soup will constantly have to taste it to know what needs to be added,” Kaweenuntawong told NPR. “When I first started in the business, my dad would make the soup and the broth and I would taste it, to understand what the perfect taste is. Nowadays, I can just look at it and know what’s missing.”
While it is remarkable that a single pot of stew is still going strong after 50 years, there are other food items that are even older and somehow still edible. The Isle of Wight County Museum in Virginia displays a ham that was cured back in 1902 that microbiologists say is still edible. “Bog butter,” a dairy/animal fat butter that was called so because it was found preserved in Ireland’s mossy wetlands, is safe enough to eat even though most of it was originally churned during the Bronze Age. There are also several accounts of honey being found in ancient Egyptian tombs, including King Tut’s, that tasted just as sweet even though it was over 3,000 years old.
While the soup at Wattana Panich has been boiling strong for three generations, time will tell to see how many other generations will replenish and consume it until the pot is finally empty and the last drop is slurped into history. For now though, it sounds like it’s worth the pilgrimage to Thailand to have a taste and not be afraid to ask for seconds.
