Arenzville, IL

Arenzville Cooks Don't Spoil the Burgoo

Q: How many cooks does it take to make a batch of burgoo?

A: In Arenzville, Ill., (pop. 432) about half the town.

“Burgoo?” you ask.

To call it soup doesn’t really do it justice. The bubbling, vegetable and meat concoction served up steaming hot each September is more like a stew. Its origins are clouded in local folklore and its contents, though simple, have evolved over the last 100 years.

In the old days you could taste local game, such as venison or squirrel, added into the mix. Nowadays you’ll taste chicken and beef cooked up with corn, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, onions, celery, and spices. Nothing out of the ordinary. So why do people line up every year to bring home gallons of the stuff?

“It’s just the way we make it, is what I figure,” says Tony Thomas, 52, who’s been helping prepare burgoo for so long he can remember coming straight from school to help stir the steaming vats with long wooden paddles. A move to mechanical stirrers in the early 1970s made things easier, and the quality has “improved tremendously” since cooks started measuring the ingredients, Thomas says.

But some things haven’t changed. Volunteers still start chopping vegetables the day before the kettles are filled and stay up all night tending the wood-burning fires and cooking the burgoo for 14 hours before it’s ready. Then for two days, several thousand people show up to eat more than 1,500 gallons of thick, chunky, almost chewy burgoo, described by Bill Privia of Arenzville as tasting a lot like “vegetable soup, just with more meat in it.”

A handful of small towns in western Illinois are known for making burgoo each year, although Arenzville has the largest event. How the tradition got started is a bit of a mystery.

“That’s a question you can start a real argument with,” says Arenzville native Molly Daniels.

Some suggest it simply grew out of a long-ago gathering of locals putting whatever food they had into a community pot for a shared meal. Another possibility is that German settlers who founded the town back in 1853 brought the tradition with them. Adding credence to that theory is the fact some towns in Kentucky founded by Germans also have a burgoo tradition.

Whatever the origins, the idea has stuck, and it’s grown into much more than a simple community meal. The annual event has developed into a major celebration that’s part festival, part homecoming, and part community fund-raiser with everything from carnival rides to big-name country music entertainment. The thousands who attend each year, as many as 5,000 in one evening, mainly come from within a 25-mile radius. But friends, relatives, and former residents from all over the country tend to drop in as well, helping to bring in as much as $40,000 each year. After costs, that translates into about $12,000 to be used for things such as youth baseball and recreation facilities.

Not bad for a town with 400 people. Maybe that’s because half the town gets involved in putting on the event. At least 200 volunteers from Arenzville and the surrounding area show up and pitch in with everything from organizing, to setup, to the ever-important job of cooking and serving the burgoo. And those who have signed up to be on the volunteer list tend to come back year after year to do it all over again.

“There’s kind of a running joke in the town that once you’re on that list, you’re on there for life,” Daniels says.

Organizer Don Wessler puts it this way: “It takes everybody in the community to do the job. Everybody knows what their duties are, and when the time comes, it all falls into place.

“It’s pretty slick, really.”

Margaret Schroeder is a freelance writer in Springfield, Ill.

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