The first question to ask—and it may not be obvious—is what, exactly, is a stew? The answer is any combination of solid food like meat or vegetables slow-cooked in a liquid long enough to allow the flavors to mingle so that not any one particular ingredient overwhelms the taste. Also important: stew much be allowed to simmer long enough to create a thick consistency. Otherwise what you have made is called soup. So clearly this book is not soup, but stew, but what does that mean?
The answer here is consistency. Empty out a pot of soup and the solid food ingredients will be carried along by the current of the liquid. Empty out a pot of stew and the solid food ingredients should pretty much say where they land. To make this metaphor clear, let’s compare another book of verse by Dahl to Rhyme Stew. Dirty Beasts is a soup because the property holding everything together is theme: all the poems are about beasts of one sort or another. The poems in Rhyme Stew, by contrast, can be plucked from their place in this collection and stand as completely on their own outside the book as they do on the inside.
“The Pig” obviously belongs in the same collection as “The Cow” and “The Porcupine.” On the other hand, although “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp” share a logical connection with each other, neither seems like it should specifically belong in the same collection as “A Hand in the Bird” or “The Dentist and the Crocodile.” Unlike Dirty Beasts or Revolting Rhymes, this collection offers no immediately identifiable thematic connection between the poems inside. Some are updates of fairy tales or legends or nursery rhymes while others are completely original. Some are on the risqué side while others are entirely appropriate for children.
In other words, this is a collection of Dahl’s verse that really is a stew in which the solid ingredients—the poems themselves—are the binding agent of force rather than the soupy quality of theme. A reader is asked to make his way from the eight pages that the opening entry requires to the four lines which comprise the entirety of the next poem. One can feats upon the racy quality of “A Hand in the Bird” to the satire of capitalism with which he remakes the fable of “The Tortoise and the Hare.” The inexplicably inappropriate nature of “Hot and Cold” is available for a light snack or one can make an entire meal from the meaty quality the modern updating of the story Ali Baba. That is one of the wonderful qualities of a finely prepared stew: it is suitable for all dining occasions with the only requisite being an appetite.
